Effort sometimes required to gain access to the grand view. Why photographers who shoot landscapes and street photos should make physical fitness part of the picture taking practice.

 

this is a stairway in Iceland. It leads up and up and up to a wonderful vantage point

from which a proficient landscape photographer could take a very interesting photograph. 

The general location is already at an altitude a good bit higher than sea level. And there is 

no lift, elevator, escalator, tram or private car access to the shooting platform at the top.

You have to hike up the stairs. And when you get to the top you'll need to have your 

pulse rate recover quickly to it's baseline in order to handhold your camera 

as effectively as you can. With minimal shake. Rather use a tripod? You'll have to carry that up

the stairs as well. 

How do you practice this at home? Walk a lot. Carry a backpack filled with weighty gear and go up and down hills to prepare yourself for journeys and adventures. Always take the stairs when it's an option.

The fewer pounds over your ideal body weight that you have to carry around makes the climb easier.

Whether your body is 40 pounds overweight or you've shoved 40 pounds of gear in a 

back path both scenarios make your climb that much harder. 

Here in the USA we make age an easy excuse for not being in shape.

"Oh....I'm 65 years old. Falling apart. If there's no bus to the top I can't

make it."  But our counterparts in other countries, from my observation, 

don't use the same tired excuses. They expect to move; and in doing 

so get more out of every trip. It's something to think about.

So much dissatisfaction with getting older could be short circuited by 

making moving and exercising as routine as eating, showering and 

sleeping. We'd collectively feel so much better.  But it's always a choice.

My biggest complaint about people over 50?

Most of them are too easy on themselves. Too pampered. A little daily 

discipline would make so many lives so much better....

Wow. The ice storm sucked. Put a hamper on my street photo practice and taught me that chopping trees with a hand saw might be inefficient but it's awfully good exercise!

 

Wet cold sucks. Black ice on asphault sucks. PTSD about loosing power in an arctic ice storm sucks (memories of Feb. 2021, remember?). Big trees dropping thousand pound branches on your roof while transformers blink like Las Vegas fireworks in the night is tough to sleep through. Getting "chilled" out of your pool for five days super sucks. And feeling like you should stick around the house to take care of emergencies that might crop up instead of getting out photographing is beyond frustrating. 

People died again here in Texas this year when the weather went to crap. Even though in central Texas it never got below maybe 25. And here in Austin I think we hovered at 29° for most of the week. But it was still tough since the rain was cold, the trees and power lines were cold and just about any moisture that fell immediately stuck to something it really shouldn't and just made a mess of stuff.  Most died in car wrecks.

When the freezing rain stopped and the black ice melted away this afternoon I walked around the neighborhood to take a look. On every block grand old tees were injured and lost plenty of branches. Ice was still falling off the leaf canopies as well as the power lines. But I think the rough weather is winding down.

I've pulled all the big and menacing looking fallen branches away from the house. The ones that are somewhat upright and ready to fall again but this time through a double glass french door ($$$) or one of the new windows ($$). Some of the biggest branches had to be chopped up in order for me to be able to move them. At 67 years wise I've decided not to try and lift stuff that's heavier than my body weight. So I've been chopping the big stuff down to size with a cross cut saw. No, not an electric one. Just a hand saw. It takes a while but at least I'm getting exercise. Someone suggested a chain saw but the last thing I want to do is operate a noisy chain saw and potentially slice through a thigh or lose a hand. And they're so noisy. Seemed more "environmentally" sound to go all manual. At least my neighbor who is an emergency room physician believes it a wise move. He's seen me try out power tools...

Why did I go to all the trouble to pile everything up in one place? Well, I've got a lone portrait assignment scheduled for tomorrow morning and I thought it was basic customer service not to have my client stepping through a tangle of fallen wood to get to my studio door. Call me old fashion. 

We're shooting with flash in the morning. Using a Panasonic S5 for a change. And a good, ol' Lumix 70-200mm lens. 

Oops. My CFO (B) just informed me that it would be nice if I spent a little time vacuuming the studio floor as well. And maybe giving the rest room a bit of a shine. Jeez. It just never slows down.

I went out to shop for some groceries today. What a mess! All three grocery stores surrounding me in my "food paradise" experienced long power outages in the last two+ days. All three had to dump every last product in their frozen foods display cases, and all of their refrigerated foods. Sure, I could buy dry goods, canned goods and fruits and vegetables but I was looking forward to celebrating our survival with something fun --- like some salmon or a steak. Maybe a nice brie cheese. Some organic kimchi. Maybe even a shared, small container of coffee ice cream. But no. I picked up some of my favorite bread, an interesting can of vegetarian chili, some more of my favorite crunchy peanut butter (which experts now say is really, really good for you!!!) and a nice bottle of red wine to serve tonight with pizza. Not a very satisfying shopping trip but at times like these I'm reminded by family and friends that I'm lucky and so privileged that I'm almost the definition of spoiled adult brat. A few days without delicacies or indulgences should be just fine. At least I'm told it's so. 

No new cameras or lenses to talk about. But I'd better get on the vacuuming. And toilet cleaning. I'd hate to fall short....

That branch is usually ten feet above my head. Put ice on it and it bends over precariously.

I hope it bends back up.

As long as it doesn't fall on top of my car I guess I'll be okay.

sunny tomorrow and I just got a note that the pool

will be returning to regular hours. Ahhhh.

Reporting in from the Central Texas Ice Storm. Nasty out there.

Every tree and bush in sight is covered with a layer of ice.

So are the electrical lines....

One of our big live oaks likes to lay its branches down on the roof when 

the frozen branches get too heavy. It's a gentle descend and no 

branches are broken.....this time. When it thaws out our hope 

is that it will spring back up. It always has before...

I woke up last night to a series of deep, low frequency hums generated by transformers headed toward catastrophic shut downs. Outside my bedroom window I kept seeing bright, long time flashes of greenish light. The kind that usually signals transformer failure. We got hit by an ice storm last night. Pretty much everyone in central Texas got walloped. 

After the first wake up I couldn't get back to sleep. I kept listening for stuff. Was the central heating cycling on and off? Were the transformer hums and bright flashes getting closer? Brighter? Louder? Could I still hear the faucet dripping in the bathroom furthest from the city water supply? Did I have a back-up plan for any of this stuff?

At some point I dozed off and got a few hours of much needed sleep. When I got up I did the rounds inside the house. No frozen pipes. check. No leaks anywhere. check. Electricity on. check. Heater functioning optimally. check. No blinking appliance clocks = no power outage. check. All good so the next step was the creation of good, hot coffee. And some breakfast. check. 

I fired up the kitchen table laptop and checked the news. 20% of Austin residents are currently knocked out of power! Tree branches and trees are down all over the city. All untreated bridges and overpasses are coated with at least half an inch of ice. Every one is sending out texts and emails to inform the public that everything is closed down. It feels a bit like the really outrageous ice storm of 2021 but this time we haven't gotten into the freezingXinfinity cold temperatures. It's just hovering for the last three days around 29 to 31°.  Just cold enough to make ice stick on everything but not cold enough to tax the power grid. 

All the outages so far seem to be the result of power lines downed by ice or ice-covered tree limbs. The grid seems to be holding up okay. 

Relief is in sight. Temp are supposed to climb into the mid-30s this afternoon. We'll have one more freezing night, accompanied by sticky rain-turning-to-ice and then we start to come out of the chilly weather and actually are predicted to get some sunshine by the end of the day Friday. 

As soon as the day started I got (and sent) dozens of texts to check on local family and friends. Ben is fine. His house lost power for one hour. He's back at his desk working with a cup of coffee close at hand and the heater working well. My brother in SA dodged the freezing weather. They just have a bunch of gray raininess. Friend, Paul, has been without power since 6 this morning. He's got a gas range so he's been able to get coffee and breakfast. We've issued blanket invitations to any who need a place to warm up and get good food service to come on over. We've got a huge living room with a lively fireplace and room for a multitude. 

So, nothing got done this week. Nothing will get done this week beyond re-supplying just in case we get another storm soon. We've mostly been doing walks when and where we can. Doing yoga in front of the TV; "Yoga with Adrian" is a house favorite. Push ups are a fact of life. No swimming until the pool opens up again (Friday???) but that's no excuse not to get the heart rate up and the lungs working. 

Sadly, when the weather gets really bad my resistance to shopping for photo gear goes down. I've found several items on line that are battering my will to resist. Including a "Khaki" limited edition Leica Q (first version) for "only" $3,000. I haven't clicked the "buy now" button yet but it feels like it's only a matter of time. My last buffer is writing this publicly with the hope that someone swoops in before me and snaps this treasure up. Thus saving me from my own shopping dalliance. 

We'll weather this with some bruises to the trees and the almost certain demise of the sad succulent garden B. has been nursing back to health since the last freeze; and hope we don't get too many more ice storms this year. A soft dusting with dry snow? We'd like that. But black ice? You can keep that. 

Now on the search for the perfect cookie. I hope it exists in the house. Especially since the stores are likely closed this morning. Ah well, I can always bake.

It was cold today. There's a winter storm warning. We're going to get freezing rain. I dressed wrong for the walk today...

If people were out today it's because of their dogs.

My hypothesis? Dogs think their owners can't handle 

rough weather alone. They go along to assist...

Over the weekend the weather forecasters on TV were dismissive about our chances for rough weather. As the day dragged on today they kept revising the forecasts. I told B. yesterday that I thought we were in for at least three days of freezing weather so we might want to prepare. You know, bring the most vulnerable potted plants into the house, put the faucet covers back on the four or five outdoor faucets, stock in some decent Bordeaux, replace that organic Columbian coffee that Ben took off my hands after dinner yesterday. General prep work. 

As the day progressed reports of the school closings started to come in. And then workplace closures for tomorrow. A text from a swimmer friend said the crowds at a local grocery store were plentiful and shopping was proceeding as if in preparation for a siege. Ya think central Texans have some weather PTSD after the big storm in February 2021??? 

Then it got personal. The pool manager sent out a text and an email to all masters swimmers to let them know that the pool would be closed until Thursday morning. They didn't want coaches or lifeguards to have to drive on ice to get to the facility. I can only imagine that some swimmers, desperate for their dose of endorphins, are already planning to jump the fence and swim surreptitiously. Count on it. 

Looks like we're going to get another three days of Winter. Some freezing rain. Up to half an inch of ice on the roadways. Many hours below 32°. So, after I digested all the weather news --- and my lunch --- I decided I'd better get out for a long walk while it was still possible. 

I've been playing around with the Leica CLs lately so I decided to take one of those along with that wacky 50mm f 0.95 TTArtisan lens. Since it was cold outside I shoved a couple extra batteries in my pocket. I took along gloves, two hats (a skull cap and a wide brim, wool hat) and my best water resistant jacket. 

When I got downtown it was dark and gloomy. I imagined what it must be like to be British. To live through stuff like this for months at a time. The wind picked up and hit me in the face....continuously. I dangled my camera against my chest on the "comes with the camera in the box" strap and took off walking. 

The only equipment failure I had was with my gloves. They were too thin. Too amateur. Too much in need of some over gloving. My fingers were getting cold. I remembered there is a Patagonia shop on Congress Ave. so I angle my amble in that direction. Glory be. The Patagonia people were holding an "after the holidays" sale (40% off) on most of their inventory so I picked up a thick pair of down-enhanced mittens with which to complete my walking adventure. I'm sure you northerners already know this but thick down filled mittens are really warm. Nicely warm. Voluptuously warm. Satisfying. The rest of the walk was comfortable. A piece of cake. Which I did not have...nor coffee of any kind.

About halfway through the walk it started to kick down icy droplets. Some solid and some liquid. The hat with the brim was a masterpiece of forethought. My Pennsylvania raised father would have been so proud. 

My waterproof Columbia, insulated boots kept my feet nice and warm. 

So, now here's the problem with going out to shoot at the outset of a big winter storm... Everyone else has headed inside. Into the bars, into the coffee shops and restaurants, into their cars and, if they are smart, into their homes. There were scant few people to see out on the streets but I did my best to get a few shots. 

Now we're settling into the weather and night is falling. Burgers are grilling away. The nice bottle of wine is breathing. What the heck am I doing sitting here instead writing another blog? Time for me to embrace the depths of the seasons. Can someone come by and sand my driveway after the freezing rain hits? No? We don't do that here in Austin? I guess we'll just hunker down until the pool opens on Thursday. 

Now this is inconvenient.

 

Who says you can't go out of focus with a smaller than full frame format cameras?

Well, they are wrong.

Were I to take an afternoon coffee break, al fresco, I would not have had 

to tussle over a table. All available for anyone who would like to 

quaff coffee during an ice storm....

Rain drop art. A VSL specialty. 

Send in the clowns. Send in the psychotic clowns....

When the weather turns nasty every building managers' thoughts turn 

to plastic plant condoms. Trying to save their investment in shrubbery. 

The shop on 2nd St. taunting the homeless by showcasing a collection of warm 

winter coats, bespoke great coats and other outerwear. Now were did I drop that thousand dollar bill?

I am back home in the office. It's warm enough.

I'm heading in the house were it's always just perfectly warm 

(except when it's just cool enough) and seeing if we 

really are having hamburgers and tater tots for dinner...

Seems like fun cold weather cuisine. 

Stay warm. Stay dry. Keep walking. Keep photographing.

Quiet photography. Steering clear of negative emotions.

 

"These fallen leaves envy those still on trees. But eventually all

 will fall to the ground and disappear into time's passage." 

When I was younger, hungrier for success, filled with anxiety, I was often jealous of other photographers' successes. It's a bad thought process. As time went by I realized that our work isn't bound by a limited collection of opportunities. There was no balance or real order to failure and success. One person's success doesn't doom another person to irrelevance. The universe is not, I think, keeping score --- even though we might be...

Now, with hindsight, I can see more clearly that individual successes in the business, or just in the personal advancement of one's art, can lift and enhance the playing fields for many who follow them in making good work. A person who is brave enough to push for higher fees or sales prices, who then is successful in getting them, sets a new, higher ceiling for everyone else. If they are wise enough to pay attention and take advantage of the altered landscape. A new gallery needs many artists not just the one on display for the next six weeks.

Often I hear from the old guard that a new person has quickly or unfairly gained popularity on Instagram or TikTok because they are female, or young, or beautiful. But when I look at the work that the "instant" Instagram success has put out into the world and compare it with the work proffered by the critic I can sometimes clearly see why the former has excelled and the latter is mired in frustration. Or fear. One is currently in step with current culture while the other wishes culture would protect tenure. It's a mean road to go down. 

It's part of a syndrome I've covered here before. Established artists sometimes find a "comfortable" style that brings them success in the moment. They get praise in the moment. And they find themselves repeating the same basic work for decades and decades either fearful or uncomfortable of stepping outside what was once a safe path for them. They seem unaware that they are stumbling down a dead end street. The work has been done and absorbed. Their real impetus going forward should be re-invention and an embrace of their vision of now.  Today. No one of any generation listens well when a conversation starts with, "Back in the golden age of......"  or "That's not the way we did....x"

Some practitioners keep making the same images but dress them up with new stylist touches. A new format. A new color palette. An unusual angle. But the core of the original vision stays the same. And they want to be commended for dressing up old ideas or constructs in a new wardrobe. But art doesn't really work that way for the vast majority of artists. 

Sure, If you are already famous you can make $$$ by churning out endless iterations of the work you became famous for. As long as collectors are anxious to buy proximity to fame you'll be in good shape. But the rest of us either need to work without the expectation that some audience will give us the stamp of approval or; even better, we need to work with ongoing curiosity and passion to produce art that resonates with the time in which we live. We need to interpret our vision in the context of our culture. Especially if we're leveraging the new tools of culture to reach an audience. 

To compare one's self to "the competition" or the newbie who has an "unfair advantage" is to miss the mark entirely. It may be that you don't really like the "new arrivals" work. That's fair. But some audience out there does and it's obviously not your audience. Since it's not your audience you have nothing to lose by the other person's success. 

Finally, if you truly believe that your work is the superior currency you might want to rethink your overall competitive strategy. Better to work on finding your own audience; people who appreciate your vision, than to tear down another artist who has no culpability in keeping you from your own success. 

Jealousy is a waste of time. A waste of energy and in the long run it chips away at whatever sector you work in. It's a better strategy to lift all boats than to try and drag everyone down to a lower level of existence.

I entitled this, "Quiet Photography" because I believe that your first and most important audience is yourself. If you keep making work in which you aren't really invested in order to achieve "likes" you are really just following someone else's dreams. And that's a dead end street. 

Deep focus. Black and white.

 

busting away from shallow depth of field and trying to get more detail in the frame.

It's something I thought I'd try. 

It was raining earlier this morning but when I got out for a walk with an SL and a 35mm lens the sun had burst through the clouds and the high temperature for the day was around 72° 

Too hot for the light jacket I brought with me. 

I worked mostly at f8 - f11 today. Manual exposure. Riding the shutter speed dial.

ISO set at 400. I found myself liking the lens but wishing it had a non-focus-by-wire manual focus capability because at f11 it could certainly be a candidate for hyperfocal focusing.

Or guess focusing. Or, as has become common use: "zone focusing." 

Then I realized that the SL will show you exactly the point of focus numerically in the window on the top panel of the camera, as well as the minimum distance and maximum distances that will be in acceptable focus. I tried it at ten feet and it worked!!! You put a slight pressure on the shutter 

release while you manually focus the lens. You can see a digital read out right in

front of your eyes. And it works.

Now...back to the studio for more work on two upcoming portraits. Gotta get dialed back in.

This is a Jpeg right out of the camera. I darkened it a bit. This is how my SL sees daylight

monochrome. I like it.

Dear God, I hate pick-up trucks. Will you please destroy them all in the upcoming

apocalypse? That would be nice. Anything you can do sooner, specifically to 

pick-up trucks, would be welcome....

A funny sign on a bench out in front of a tattoo studio. 

Really? Maybe not...

When an ADA ramp is the most interesting thing to photograph on a given 

day it might be time to take a break from downtown and find a new 

extension to my photographic hobby....

Last night I met Tom. He owns Bergen Camera in New Jersey. 

His store is a huge Leica dealer. Their showroom is a stone's 

throw from Leica's North American H.Q. 

He was really interesting because his first passion isn't Leica

cameras it's collecting fine art photography. And shooting

photographs.

My Austin friend, David, showed up at the same party. 

He was sporting a Leica Q2 "Ghost" edition camera 

and had a small flash on the top. I looked at his "party pix."

Flash and camera worked flawlessly together. 

Imagine that. Using what most consider a "collector's item" Leica as 

a daily carry camera and banging away at a party with it. 

Not all Leica Ghost owners are collectors or dentists....

David is quite an accomplished film maker but since 

I'm not his agent I won't bother mentioning anything else...

Studio reset. Moving backwards in time. Re-embracing bigger flash again...

 I've spent the last few years photographing portraits predominately with LED lighting. It's a nice way to work because you can see exactly what you are getting as you progress through a shoot. Lately I've been going through older portraits that I really like and noting how they were shot (helps as a commercial photographer to keep little notebooks with quick sketches and descriptions of your lighting set-ups).  

It seems that most of my favorites were actually done with electronic flash. That was a revelation to me. But everything is a trade off, right?

What I found I was missing is exactly what flash used to provide; the ability to know that you've frozen subject and camera movement and the ability to use both smaller apertures and lower ISOs. It's a different look. Sharper in the details because of getting closer to the sweet spot of a lens, and a different tonality caused by the lower ISOs and a different noise profile in the images. 

In the run-up to my big Abbott (medical products+poeple) shoot in the Fall I was torn between using LEDs (which had become second nature to me...) and falling back to using flash. 

I'd sold most of my bigger flashes in favor of a small and lightweight flash system I could more easily travel with. That travel kit includes three of the Godox AD200 Pro lights and a bunch of their different heads and modifiers. It's a great system for on the road. But I felt like I needed more power to punch into a big 47 inch octabox with added diffusion on the front of it. For a big, soft and inefficient box I wanted something twice as powerful in one light. I also wanted a real modeling light instead of the small LED that the AD200s use. It's one of the trade-offs of the AD200s battery power supply; the need to conserve power.

I had one bigger electronic flash fixture in the studio. It's the Godox DP400mk3. That fixture puts out 400 watt seconds of flash, has a 150 watt tungsten modeling light and is solidly built with a metal body and an in-built cooling fan. They are pretty inexpensive. You can buy them new from B&H for about $200. The light has a full complement of controls and a full power recycle time of one second. 

Since I was on the fence in my pre-production and was nearing a coin toss to decide between flash and continuous lighting I thought it prudent to buy a second DP400iii since my imagined lighting design pretty much demanded two big flashes to the front of the set and then lower powered direct flashes to illuminate the white background. I ordered the second light from B&H but ended up taking the other path and using Nanlite LED fixtures for the project. The shoot was very successful but I'm reasonable certain we would have been able to pull it off just fine whichever lighting method we went with. 

So, now I have this body of work that I've re-discovered that I really like and want to extend. The portraits I shot in the film days and pre-continuous light days of digital. It seems based on the use of a single, big main light of electronic flash, with a big modifier, augmented by a second light to bring up the backgrounds. And now I just happen to have several almost unused flash instruments to play with. 

I've spent part of this weekend back in the studio setting up the flashes and experimenting with the light in order to get back to a style I did almost non-stop back in the 1990s. I didn't realized it at the time but each type of lighting is a style in itself even if you use exactly the same modifiers, in the same placements, to shoot with. I say I didn't realize it but really I was just letting my impulsive desire for constant change over ride my logical sensibilities. That, and trying to find one type of light that would work equally well with photography and video...

None of this is "all or nothing." I'm not suddenly going to try something like a new approach to street photograph by adding flash to the mix (not yet, at any rate). But I am gearing up to go backwards in the studio and reconnect with all the things I liked about shooting in the studio with flash. 

Now that the numbers for Covid have dropped into the low category in Austin, and there is a general decline in community transmission in the county, I am more comfortable inviting people back into the studio. Here we go again. 

Addendum: Many of the images I've looked through come from the days when I shot with four different cameras that all had one thing in common. I worked, serially, with the Bronica SQ-Ai, the various Hasselblads, the Mamiya 6 cameras and the Rollei 6008i systems. The one feature all of them had in common was the square, 1:1, 6x6cm aspect ratio and image size. And it's a geometric format I love to photograph with for portraits. 

To that end I'm currently working with the Leica SL2 and shooting it in the square format. If the portrait project stays with me and I with it I'll almost certainly start looking at which 100 megapixel medium format system might work well for this kind of work. Cropped to squares, of course. The cost of a Fuji GFX100S body is less than that of the SL2 so it's not a tremendous reach. And the lenses are even more of a bargain. I'd like to print large but I'll see what I can get out of the SL2 while banging away with flash and ISO 100. Might be all I need....

Hope your Sunday is going well.