Just a refresher for all my friends who've purchased a film Leica M camera, a 28mm lens and who have decided to become "street photographers." You might have already read this one....

 https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2011/05/approval-tacit-approval-implied.html

It's from 12 years ago. But I think it's appropriate for the moment.

Just re-enjoying a photo I made many years ago when we spent more time playing and a lot less time arguing, posturing, competing and dissecting the things we were engaged with.

 Amy walked into my little studio in Westlake Hills with her good friend Renae. Renae was my assistant for a number of years and maybe I remember those years as "the Golden Years" of photography partially because of my collaborations with Renae and partly because we had both time and  optimism on our side. 

The studio space was perennially and almost permanently set up with lights just in case someone interesting/beautiful/wonderful dropped by. We didn't over think technique back then. We played more than we (collectively) do now. There didn't seem to be much on the line to prevent a certain insouciance and fluidity to our pursuit of things like spur of the moment portraits. 

I asked Amy if we could make a portrait and she, of course, agreed. She did a little touch up on her make up and then stepped into the sweet spot of a 40 by 60 inch softbox's glow. 

I focused as well as I could with an old Leica R8, stopped the even older 90mm Summicron (no APO or ASPH) down to f5.6, Renae did a quick check with a light meter and we snapped our way through a 36 exposure roll of Ektachrome or Fujichrome. Maybe it was Astia. Whatever. It was some ISO 100 slide film and when I got it back from the lab I thought it looked great. 

It's funny. Sometimes I post stuff to make a point about gear or technique but most of the time, at least with portraits, I'm posting stuff because I enjoy looking at it for a second, third or hundredth time. For me that's the real value of doing the work. 

And the joy of it.

Wanna Compete with stuff like this? Really? I'd rather take a walk or read something interesting.

 

Take a selfie or two on your smart phone and send it along to them. They'll use A.I. to make it into a "real photograph/headshot" and give you a bunch of variations to choose from in just two hours. For $29. Done.

And by "done" I mean the business of commercial headshots not a "task completed." 

This is all hitting right now. No reason not to enjoy taking photographs for fun. Just going to be a lot harder for a lot of folks to make a living competing.

Inflection points. The end of one era of photography and the beginning of another.

 

this is a prime example of the machines with which we used to create profit

by doing photography. No AF, no autowind, no endless buffer, no high res EVF, 

no cost free frames. But man! Could they convert vision to dollars!

and this was the work I liked to do with that camera. 

One thing we learned in the lightning fast transition from film to digital in the commercial world is that big changes to a culture, a technology or the acceptance of a new paradigm aren't slow moving events. Kodak's best strategic brains assumed that they would have years of film dominance even as late as the early 2000's only to see global adaptation of digital cameras happen almost overnight. By the same token, if you had asked industry "experts" back in 2010 or even 2012 what the future trajectory of interchangeable lens digital cameras was you would have heard, almost uniformly, that the growth of the industry was at its infancy and it was all clear skies and big profits ahead. Ask several of the computer companies a couple of years ago about desktop computer sales and they would have predicted a steady replacement rhythm instead of the 25% drop in purchasing, year over year (except for Apple whose computer sales dropped by little over 1%....outlier?). 

I would have thought that DP Review would have chugged along until at least a couple of big players took Samsung's cue and exited the interchangeable lens camera market altogether. But I guess declining sales, bloated and costly staffing and a failed strategy toward maintaining profitability snuck up much quicker and more decisively than any of us imagined. 

Photography is being re-invented yet again. I swam with a technologist from a major, major technology superpower company this morning. After our workout we got into a long discussion about all the disruptions taking place across many markets. He makes a living strategizing about technology trends. His take is that we are at an inflection point not just for photography but across a number of industries and we are never going back to the way it was only a few years (or even months) ago. And he was predicting that the disruptions, changes and creations of new tools (Dall-e, Chatbots, ChatGBT, A.I., Machine learning) and so much more is starting to look like the massive shift that occurred with the 2007 introduction of Apple's iPhone. But on a more diverse and expanded group of technologies. And across an even bigger playing field.

It's wise to remember that pre-iPhone we needed computers to function in the work space. We needed laptops for mobile computing and communication. We needed stand alone cameras. We needed music players to enjoy our music with. We needed hulking big video cameras to make movies with. We needed ATMs to do our banking. We needed maps to get to new locations in our cars. We needed phones to call people and to do primitive texting. Think ahead to now and how our phones have wiped out the need for so many peripherals we once thought to be necessary and practical. And so many services (banking, shopping, etc.) have been de-peopled and streamlined. 

I wrote a blog post while flying back from the NYC Photo Expo in 2013 (also shuttered as no longer relevant) about societal change in photography and parts of the post were prescient. Here's a link: The Graying of Photography.  Read it. It might make more sense now.

But it's not as if we didn't have clues and telltales about the onrushing inflection point we seem to be in the middle of right now. Here are two subsequent articles, each written eight or nine years ago pointing to exactly what is unfolding right now: 

https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2015/10/some-observations-after-speaking-to.html

https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2014/09/after-gold-rush-where-is-photography.html

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that commercial ($$$) photography as we know it is going to cease to exist in a couple of years. No one will be monetizing the work being created at anywhere near the scale we were able to in the past. But a new understanding and market for photography will emerge. We just have to be open to understanding it and willing to take part in it. Or....we can keep copying work like Ansel Adams landscapes and Robert Frank street photography, and considering a paper print to be the gold standard, until we all die off and head to visual Valhalla to commiserate with the buggy whip makers, the floppy disk engineers and the people checking to see if anyone left their change in a payphone booth. Me? Oh I'll be hanging out by the cigarette machines looking to pick up models for after-life retro portrait photography.

The closing of DP Review is just one of many sign posts and they weren't the first to go. Not by a long shot. They held on as long as they did because they were better capitalized. Not because they were better. 

A quiet walk up and down S. Congress Ave. looking for pix and enjoying a cappuccino. A mid-afternoon cappuccino.

 

Sent this photo to my spouse who is out of town taking care of family....

I was looking for something a bit different this afternoon. I'm sure these are a radical departure from my usual style but I was using the little Sigma fp and the matching 45mm f2.8 Sigma lens. I even went with the camera fully stripped down. No finder, no hood. And it worked just fine even out in the daylight. But I did have to wear my eyeglasses to see the screen well enough. 

This part of South Austin has become tourist central. There are nice restaurants and endless boutiques up and down the street. But it's lost most of its "rougher" charm. I keep hoping that the downtown area gets a dose of rejuvenation; but just enough.

Walking around with the little fp and the small 45mm lens was relaxing and with them as my casual cameras I don't set unreal expectations. The pair work really well together and the colors are nice. I was lazy today so I went with .DNG files instead of Jpegs. When I shoot Jpeg I'm always riding the white balance settings with the intention of getting as close to accurate color as possible. I also "cheated" and used Auto-ISO. 

I really love vintage trailers. They seem so 1950s. Largely replace by Airstreams and big RVs these days but the charm of a small trailer or even a "tear drop" trailer is not lost on me.

Still. I have no idea with "Leaf Porn" is and little to no inclination to find out.

That's a whole lot of "No-s" for a retail store. Maybe that's why I've never been in

even though they sell candy and I love some kinds of candy...

Austin's love affair with Willie Nelson continues unabated. And South Congress seems 

to grow a new mural every week...

 I was walking through the famous Hotel San José when I bumped into famous 

photojournalist and educator, Don Winslow. We had a great chat about Rome.

We both wished we were there right now photographing. Fun to see famous icons

sporting cameras around town! 

One of my favorite S. Congress mural destinations. It's a Home Slice Pizza. 

It's good pizza and way popular but closer to home I get better pizza

at Baldinucci Pizza. Love the Roman style crust.

Seemed like an unprovable brag but the cappuccino they whipped up for me

today puts them into the running. Yeah, It's Jo's Coffee. All outdoor seating, but covered 

in case of rain, hail or snow.

The backdoor at Amy's Ice Cream. Another Austin original that's spread across the state...

What if the other guy is right?

 

an attempt at a softer touch in processing.

I stayed out of the fracas between Mike Johnston and Moose a few days ago. Moose had taken one of MJ's photos, manipulated it and then displayed both the original and the "enhanced" version side by side and proceeded to make an argument that MJ was processing images too flat. MJ pushed back and said he liked em that way. And that they were not "too flat" from his point of view. And that was the way he intended them.  All of which started me thinking about the way I process my own images and display them on the web. My knee jerk reaction was that my own work looked "better" if it was snappier and more saturated. My black and whites better with more "clarity." But as I mulled this over and over in my head I remembered something my father used to say to me when I was so, so sure I was right and whoever I was arguing with was dead wrong. "Consider this..." he would say, "What if the other guy is right?"

Which got me thinking even harder. I grabbed a few favorite files and started looking at them made softer, harder, sharper, more diffuse, brighter, darker and, of course, snappier. By the end I was more confused than when I started. 

Then I remembered B's ever-present mantra about.....everything: "All Things In Moderation." 

And I remembered that all through her career as an award-winning art director and graphic designer for some of the USA's biggest businesses she always steered toward the middle ground. Not "boring" middle but "accessible" middle. It was nearly always work that pleased her design sensibilities, spoke to consumers and delivered for clients. 

Maybe that is a target I should be aiming for in my own post production. Timeless versus cutting edge. Comfortable instead of trendy. Happy instead of strident. It's a thought anyway.

Really though, what if the other guy is right? Can you change your mind?

Taking my own advice and stepping away from the internet for the day. With a camera over one shoulder.

This is pretty much how my eyes saw this scene. Maybe not with as much saturation but with some information in the shadows...

This is how my Leica SL2 saw the same scene with the same exposure setting for the highlights. 

Some photographers reject post processing but I say, "make the shadow/highlight/clarity (mid-range contrast) sliders your allies. 

Same with the two below.

I felt a certain sense of calmness when I pushed away from the keyboard and monitor yesterday. I put on comfortable shoes. I walked. I looked at stuff at a distance. I drank a nice coffee at Mañana. I had a decent croissant as well. And as I was sitting at a café table watching the sun go down and feeling the wind pick up I did an inventory of the day. 

When I got up I read the national newspapers. Something I'll slow down on and maybe try to be more supportive of the local papers and outlets. I went to the gym and used their machines to really try and strengthen my core, my lats, my triceps and my larger leg muscles. I stretched. And felt exhausted by the end. 

I made some scans of old negatives in the office and was delighted by the results. I read a few online articles already memorializing DPR. I felt conflicted. 

The cure for temporary confliction for me is a good swim so I went to the noon workout and swam well with a smaller crew that we usually have at early morning practices. Instead of only working on swimming hard and fast I took the coach's suggestion and worked on feeling balance in the water. A fun exercise is to float on your back with your nose, belly button and toes out of the water and to stay calm and quiet. Maximum balance is hard to achieve but pushing more doesn't make it better. You actually have to relax to do that drill well. And I think we could all do a better job of relaxing.

I came back home, had lunch and then took a 25 minute nap. Ran a few errands. Ignored the siren call of the internet. Checked the stock market on my phone. Was happy with what I found and thought about going online to buy something cool. Resisted the urge to fire up the Easy Buying Machine and went off the above mentioned walk instead. Played around with my camera and with the files. 

The rest of my evening was more or less typical. Dinner, do the dishes, read until the book started dropping out of my hands and my eyes closed without my willing participation. 

It is possible to curtail time spent online. It's hard to do because it's become such a habit for so many of us.  One good exercise that might work as a first step is this: When you go out for a walk or a photo walk just leave your phone in your house or your care. Don't put it in your pocket or your camera bag or your backpack. If it's there you'll want to use it; check it; check your stocks, check the weather, see if anyone called, check your favorite website, check you stocks, check the weather, see if anyone texted, etc.

If your phone isn't with you then you won't need to spend time serving it with your precious time. Everything can wait till you get back. Really, everything will be fine.