Easter is a time when we just photograph everything at f2.0. Okay...we can also use f1.4.

B. is in S.A. taking care of her mom. The refrigerator is still broken. No swim practice on Easter. The pool is closed. It's overcast. It's the perfect day to roam around downtown and play with a new lens.

I rounded up a spare battery, plugged the Voigtlander 58mm f1.4 lens onto the front of a Leica SL2, ditched my cellphone into a desk drawer, double-knotted my walking shoes and headed downtown. My intention today was to photograph everything I wanted to photograph while doing it in black and white, at ISO 50 and with the lens spot-welded at f2.0. I gave myself permission to try some shots at f1.4; just to see how it might work out. 

If you are of a certain age you probably remember the Easters of your youth in the same way I do. All the stores were closed. All the churches were open. Some families dressed up with the little girls in pink dresses and matching shoes and the boys looking uncomfortable in hand-me-down jackets, choking-collared white shirts and clip-on bowties. Other families looked out the window at the earnest church-goers going by, with shaky dads holding the curtains open a bit with one hand while nursing a hangover with a can of beer in the other. 

I had to go to church back then because my father played the organ there. He didn't really believe in any of the religious dogma but he loved wailing away on the big organ just behind and to the right of the pulpit of the church. We sat bored and uncomfortable, feet unable to reach the floor and looking vaguely forward to a nice brunch at a restaurant with white tablecloths, extra forks and spoons,  tuxedoed waiters and an older African American man in a black suit playing "Alley Cat", "Mack the Knife" and other favorites on a much smaller organ. A restaurant sized organ. We got to order hamburgers and french fries. The grown-ups got shrimp cocktails with cocktail sauce, and then steaks. 

At some point in the day either my brother or I got in trouble for drawing pictures of the Pillsbury Dough Boy with captions that read: "He Has Risen." 

It all seemed so innocuous back before the far right started weaponizing religion again... Funny that "Happy Holidays!" is now a call to arms... so sad. So misguided. So....off message.

Sunday morning in Austin was quite different today. In fact, it seemed like just another day in a (cloudy) paradise. Torchy's Tacos was open so I was thrilled to get a bacon, egg and cheese breakfast taco and a coffee there. The restaurants were open up and down Congress Ave. and also Second St. The homeless on the streets were a deep contrast to the well dressed crowds hustling by on their way to hotel restaurants for Eggs Benedict and Mimosas. And the weather over all was comfortable but gloomy. 

I walked through downtown with the camera over my left shoulder and my sunglasses hanging off the collar of my black shirt. The one with the demure Nike logo on the front.  I was interested to see how the lens performed when I used it close in and wide open. Seems pretty nice to me. The contrast there is a bit low but that's why Adobe invented the contrast slider and the clarity slider in Lightroom. If you can correct for geometric distortion and vignetting in the camera's firmware  is it any more "cheating" if you correct the contrast in your software?

I didn't stay long. I made a loop through the parts I thought might be interesting today and then headed back to the house. I was on a mission. I'd volunteered to bring along two nice bottles of white wine to have with fish at a friend's house later this afternoon and it dawned on me that I needed to chill the bottles and.....no refrigerator. In 2023, in an age of endless affluence, I actually had to go to a convenience store and buy some ice with which to chill the wine. Savagery. Despair. 

To sum up: The re-delivered lens is great. That and the 40mm are a fun pair. Not having a functioning refrigerator has moved from being annoying and frustrating to being an interesting experiment in adaptation. With luck and lawyers the fridge should be fully restored by Tuesday. The lens doesn't need any repairs which is enough to currently endear any device to me. Car, camera, lens, water faucet.... If it works I'm a fan. 

It's a weird holiday for me this year. Usually spent with family. Not this time. But it's good to have friends. The more the better. And I'm avoiding Peeps this year and embracing Cadbury Eggs instead. It's part of my theologically inclusive Easter diet plan. 

It's not as much fun searching for Easter eggs if you have to hide them from yourself, for yourself.... Just a thought.

A quick note. I'll leave it just as a headline. I want to thank everyone who commented this past week. It made writing blog posts fun, happy, rewarding and comfortable. We don't always agree but if we did there would be no sense reading it. Right? Thanks!!!

 

I guess this week's fascination is with products from Voigtlander. At least that's what I'm currently interested in....

 

The nicely recessed front element largely eliminates the need for a lens hood. Maybe. 

One standing by, just in case. 

Lenses seem to be this month's fascination. I can't imagine a better camera for me than a Leica SL2 so I've given up even reading camera reviews --- by anyone. This has allowed me to concentrate more completely on the most fun part of photography gear, the ever interesting subject of camera lenses! 

The current fascination mostly started on a lark. I was looking at L mount lenses at B&H's website with the idea of finding a small, light, cheap but good lens to take with me on a vacation to Vancouver last November. I didn't like the options I found for the L mount; or I already owned a number of them and was looking for a different set of compromises... whatever reason I stumbled across lenses over in the Leica M mount section. That was okay because I knew I could adapt any of the M lenses to the L mount with a simple adapter. 

I found a lens that was small, fast, reviewed as being sharp and interesting, and available, on sale, at a very affordable price. It was the 40mm f1.4 Nokton Classic, with multi-coating (apparently, if you like flare and some additional artifacts some Voigtlander lenses are available in a single coated version....) and it was priced at $399. It came in a classic M lens configuration with cams for rangefinder coupling and the cool little finger grip for fast focusing. I bought a lens hood and a B+W filter for the front (knowing I'd be out shooting in the rain a lot) and I took that lens with me as my only lens, paired with a Panasonic S5; the "early adopter" version, not the S5II. 

I shot a couple thousand frames with the lens and really liked the way the files looked. There is a bit of uncorrected barrel distortion and the usual vignetting one sees from most fast and wide-ish lenses but for the most part it was great --- easy to focus and tiny. There is one fault with my copy that would have been a catastrophe for an M rangefinder user who doesn't test gear before traveling with it. The focus calibration is pretty far off. What that means is that when the lens hits its hard stop at infinity it's focused far beyond infinity (if that's theoretically possible) and what you gain past infinity you loose in close focusing capabilities.  Oh, and the marked distance versus the focused distance are two wildly different settings. Used on a rangefinder you would always be focusing well behind your subjects. No big deal on a mirrorless camera. One of the charms of the mirrorless tech. 

The one aspect of the 40mm lens I really liked was, in fact, the focal length. Nearly 45 years ago, when I was just a photographer child I scrimped and saved and bought a Leica CL. Not the digital one, obviously, but the original. It came with a 40mm f2.0 Summicron C lens. The lens was superbly sharp. Far sharper than any lens I had ever put on any of the Canon cameras I had been shooting for a number of years. I loved the lens and the focal length and could kick myself, hard, for ever selling it. But I had yet to gather my "extensive fortune" by that time (still trying). And so the lens went on the chopping block to pay for something else. But I never got over that focal length. It seemed, in some ways, so "right." 

This Spring I realized that I had hit a milestone and, in the Leica cameras I'd acquired, I'd found a system that I haven't felt the least bit of motivation to move on from. Or to add to; camera-wise.  I felt a stability creeping into my viewpoint on cameras that I hadn't felt for a long time. But as the desire for new cameras faded my brain compensated by increasing my desire to track down the "perfect" lenses for me. Not for you, or the sports photographer you know, or the photo-journalist you read about. Just the perfect lenses for me.

Unlike Leica, Sigma, Panasonic and others Voigtlander is not concentrating on making ultra-of-the-moment, best-in-class lenses. They don't make autofocus lenses, nor are any of their Voigtlander branded lenses featuring stuff like image stabilization. You have to focus by hand. And learn how to hold your camera and lens nice and steady. But what they are making is a collection of lenses that I would label: Romantic. 

By romantic I mean that they provide a visual profile that's more similar to film era lenses than to the highly corrected lenses being made for digital. The centers are quite sharp at the first few apertures on the lens but the corners are much less sharp. The lenses's optical designs are simpler and the corners get nice and contrasty, sharp too, as one stops down toward the middle apertures. The lenses I am interested in are so similar to early, all metal Nikon lenses when it comes to dress and construction. And, incidentally, the lenses in which I am most interested are the ones that are currently (still?) available in the Nikon F mount. 

I experimented with my friend, Paul's nearly brand new Voigtlander 58mm f1.4 lens last month. At the time I thought the Sigma Contemporary series 65mm f2.0 was so close in focal length and so much better an all around performer that I would pass on Paul's offer to sell me the lens at a most advantageous (to me) price. But over time the samples I shot with that Voigtlander 58mm lens have grown on me. Made me realize that I grew up and learned my craft at a time when these lenses, or lenses like them, were our aspirational tools. I loved re-connecting with the feel and the visual structuring of this type of lens when I revisited the 58mm in March. 

Last week I took delivery of a brand new Voigtlander 40mm f2.0 Ultron SIIs. It's the latest permutation of that lens, evolved over time, by the company, and looking so much like a metal focusing ring Nikon 50mm F lens from the 1960s. Even down to the "rabbit ears" aperture grabber on the aperture ring (used to connect to pre-AI camera metering systems from the middle ages of photography). 

 

A couple of days ago I put up a quick gallery of images I shot with the lens on my first foray out with it. It balanced nicely on the front of an SL2 and I liked the images a lot. You can see them here: https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2023/04/stuff-photographers-worry-about-that.html just scroll down past the "gray space" (type). 

My takeaway is that the lens does a lot of stuff just right. The focal length is between the 35mm that most prefer and the 50mm+ that I'm used to. It makes this lens wide enough to capture environmental portraits without a lot of elongation of noses or novel recessions of ears, etc. while getting enough of the background in to make an interesting image situated --- somewhere. The lens is quite sharp in the center of the frame which works well for portraits (and most other subjects) and then field curvature makes the far edges and corners less sharp and more nicely out of focus. Stopped down to f5.6 it's as sharp as anything I own. 

The 40mm Ultron is currently available in a Nikon F mount for around $419 USD. I think it's a good value for the price. And my success with the 40mm pushed me to go back and look at samples I shot with the 58mm. In retrospect I like those images a lot. Especially the combination of the color and contrast; even with images done at the maximum aperture. Can't wait to try it out as an APS-C portrait lens on a CL.

I texted Paul today to ask if he still wanted to sell his 58mm. He was game. I asked why? He liked the lens so much that last time I was playing with it he was pretty sure I would want one and so, when he found a copy in just as good shape, and for a great price, used, he bought it as well. Now he's got two and I got the feeling that he was holding one back for me until I came to my senses and just bought it. We've both been buying and selling lenses to  each other for about 25 years. I think he's got a good intuition about what I will eventually want to own....

In about an hour we'll meet for coffee at our favorite coffee shop. I have already written out a check for him. Sorry. No Venmo here. Just old school banking. We'll compare notes about life and work and then I'll leave with the 58mm, bring it home and put an adapter on it. Tomorrow I'll go out with the 58 or the 40 and spend some time playing around. It'll be a nice change since it feels like it's been raining for a month here and the weather is supposed to start clearing up. 

Now, why the Nikon mount? Well, I look at it as today's universal mount because the flange distance is long enough to enable one to mount it on just about any mirrorless camera being made right now. Were I to suffer a severe concussion, wake up and for some reason want to buy a bunch of Sony A7xxx cameras I could use any of these current F mount Voigtlanders on those "cameras" just by switching out inexpensive adapters. Another reason is that these two lenses, as far as I know, are only available in Nikon F mounts or Pentax K mount versions and I'm thinking the Pentax mount is part of an ever shrinking market. Getting adapters for Nikon to L mount is simple right now --- not so sure about Pentax to L mount...

That's all the lens news I have for today. Stay tuned for a gallery or two of the results from both. 

Resoundingly old school. Maybe bordering on "ancient school." 

A "re-print" of something I wrote for Michael Johnston's "TheOnlinePhotographer" twelve long years ago. More appropriate today that it was at the time. And tangentially the subject of a recent series of columns. Enjoy?! From 2011.

To see the original with photos and comments appended, go here: https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2011/12/kirks-take-kirk-tuck-2.html#more                             

Action vs. Activity. One makes you an artist,
the other makes you tired.

By Kirk Tuck

Action and activity are two very different things and it's important for an artist to know which one they're focusing on. Action derives from need or reaction. You are hungry so you eat. You need to get somewhere quickly so you walk faster. You need to get warm so you head for shelter. You have a vision you want to interpret as a photograph so you do the process of making that photograph. You are pushed to eat from necessity and you are pushed to create the photograph by necessity. One driver is physical while the other pursuit is driven by passion. Both are pretty unencumbered pathways and both have an immediate aim. Eating gives you the fuel to go on while creating art gives you the emotional fuel to enjoy life.

Compare honest hunger with a more common variation: Eating because you are bored. Eating because the food is in front of you. Eating because you want to keep your hands busy. And, eating because the taste of whatever you’re eating entertains you. In this sense eating becomes an activity instead of an action. And activities are the biggest time wasters in our lives.

As photographers our focus should be on the making of images. But that's hard work. Even if you are hungry to make an image, there are all kinds of impediments. You might have to find models or subjects that truly resonate with the vision you have in your head, and you'll have to find locations and you might even have to get permission from a property owner to make your image on their property. But if you are really driven to make the image and express your art you'll find a way to channel the resources and the energy. If you are committed to expressing yourself and sharing your interpretation of the world around you then you'll punch through the mental and rationally-based "resistance" to actually creating art, and you'll get your project done. That's action. It comes from a need: the need to express your art. The action fulfills the need.

And if you practice your art with a focus on the action you'll find that it becomes less and less scary to pick up the tools of your art and head out the door to just do the process. But...some of us get trapped by one or more of the insidious spider webs immobilizing us from taking the right action. We get stuck in one of the levels of hell that I call "Endless Preparation." It's also known far and wide as "Research."

For photographers endless preparation begins with the selection of camera gear. As rational, educated and affluent adults we move in a world of bountiful information but we’re not always good at asking the right questions or divining the right answers. In fact, we focus so narrowly on some parameters and not at all on others. We've been taught that good preparation is paramount for any successful mission and we’ve taken that to heart. And so we begin the first part of the journey into the sticky spider webs of rampant indecision and quantitative ambiguity.... I’ve been doing it all month. I would be better served inviting my quirky and interesting friends into my little studio and making their portraits with whatever camera and lights I already have, but...shamefully, I've allowed my subconscious resistance to getting that project started push me into the un-winnable endless loop of trying to decide which little mirrorless, compact camera deserves my true affection. Will it be the Nikon V1 or the Olympus EP3? And, of course, it doesn't matter which decision I make because I'll end up using it for casual work and not the work that really motivates me to create my own personal art. But I've already wasted plenty of time shooting with both cameras and then writing down and sharing my observations. In a sense I'm also guilty of enabling other would be artists' progress by inferring that the issue of picking the ultimate "little camera" from a "moving-target" list of camera is an important and valuable consideration. Which, of course, it's not.

And even though my mercurial and unstable selection processes are becoming (sad) legend among fellow photographers, I find it hard to resist. Just like everyone with a facile and functioning mind, I've found that my subconscious can rationalize the hell out of just about any equipment "research" and acquisition. The latest is a little voice that says, "The art of photography is getting more fluid and fluent. We’re capturing sequences and interlacing it with video and all the presentations are going to the web. We need small cameras that can capture both quickly and easily. The small cameras with fast processors are the equivalent magnitude of destructive innovation engendered by the screwmount Leica cameras of the 1940s and early 1950s." Hell, given time I'm sure I could rationalize selling my car and buying all the small camera models.

You may laugh at my personal quagmire but I see variations in and among my friends and colleagues and all over the web. You may be the kind of person who finds the activity of researching and testing small cameras lacking in restraint, but your "activity" might be endlessly profiling your printer, your monitor, your camera, your wall, your light stands and so on. While my wasted time is spent comparing reviews and specifications of delightful neckwear bling, your wasted time is spent scanning and shooting Greytag MacBeth color targets and "mapping" them to some new paper from Croatia. It’s really the same thing. It's a preparatory activity that's powered by the rationalization of mastery, but it's really just a strategy to procrastinate from dipping a toe into the unknown.

      

I also have a friend who is really a good photographer who has been on a relentless workshop circuit. If someone's offered a workshop somewhere on the web he's probably been there and taken it. And yet what each workshop offers is a new set of technical skills that he feels he must master before he heads out to do his "real work." But since there's an endless supply of workshops, and a nearly endless reiteration and repackaging of techniques, he's mostly ensured that, without some effective catharsis, he will never really get around to doing the work he envisioned when he first became entangled in the sticky webs of photography.

     

If the activity that fills your nervous void is something like eating or smoking, chances are you will either become very large or very sick. But if your activity is the research and mastery of every corner of our craft, you will become an expert in arcane lore and analysis and a pauper in creating and sharing finished art. And there's is no law that says you can't make that choice. But so many of us are so well trained in debate and rationalization that we suppress a reality that we should at least give a passing nod to. In some ways my own blog tends to enable the endless search for endless things for which to search. But it sounds preachy if I tell everyone to stop reading and contemplate what it is they really want to say with images.

So, what am I getting at? Well, I'm trying to become a "recovering" researcher in my own work and I've made myself a little checklist to work with. I’ve set some ground rules to keep myself within the design tolerances of sanity. We'll see how well this works out....

Kirk’s Rules of choosing Action over Activity:

1. It's okay to buy a new camera, but I am required to go out and shoot fun images with it for more time then I spend writing about it or measuring its results.
2. It's better to shoot images that are fun, make you laugh and make your friends happy than images you think will impress other photographers. Even better if the images can work in both camps.
3. If there's no reason for me to be out shooting I can default to a nap on the couch to replenish my body and spirit. Sometimes pushing myself out the door is just the wrong move.
4. If I catch myself shooting test charts I stop immediately and head out the door with a good book. Or a camera.
5. The feel of a camera in my hand should always trump someone else's written evaluation. No one really knows how I want things to look.
6. I have a post card sized white card pinned to the wall behind my computer that says, "Making Portraits is my Art. Anything else I do is not-art."
7. Quiet contemplation is more conducive to having fun ideas than relentless study.
8. All the things I really need to know to create are already locked away in my brain, I just need to be still and quiet enough to open that door. Sitting quietly beats looking at DxO results for thinking about creativity.
9. Inspiration comes to those who leave space for it to come in. A busy mind usually lacks the space.
10. I have a smaller card tacky waxed to the bottom edge of my monitor that says, "To stop suffering stop thinking."

And therein lies the real secret roadblock to all creativity...at least for me. We spend far too much more time thinking about our art than just doing our art. Being smart is highly overrated because it requires us to do too many mental exercises to prove to ourselves that we should be doing what we already know we want to be doing. And the process of rationalizing and the desire to master each step is the process of not doing the final step. The "going out and shooting."

      

The photographic process (in a holistic sense) works best for me when it works like this: My brain comes up with an idea for a visual image. (Not the overlay of techniques but the image itself ). I quickly decide how I will do the image. I go into action and book a model or call a likely subject. We get together and I try to make my vision work. Within the boundaries of the original idea we play around with variations and iterations. Finally, the photo session hits a crescendo, and the subject and I know we've gone as far as we can, and are spent.

My years spent as an engineering student taught to be logical and linear, but have been my biggest impediment to doing creative work. Because there's always a subroutine running that says, "This is the step-by-step approach to doing X." And I'm always trying to approach things logically. But to get to X is hardly ever a straightforward process and being able to step outside routine and to stretch past logic creates the time when fun stuff happens.

Beyond my ten steps to choose action over activity is the realization that I already know enough technical stuff to last a lifetime. And, if we admit it to ourselves, the technical stuff it the easiest part to learn because there are no immediate consequences to learning or not learning the material. Really. You might waste a bit of time and money but for most of us that's about it. The hard part is being brave enough to stake out a vision and work on it. The hardest part for most of us is to continually engage the people around us that we want to photograph and convince them to collaborate in the realization of our vision. But it's only through doing it again and again that our styles emerge and our art gets stronger. The technical stuff is so secondary.

As an exercise, when I'm out walking around with my camera I make it a point to approach a stranger each time and ask them if we can make a portrait together. If I get turned down, I approach someone else until I find someone who's willing to put a toe across the fear line and play. The image isn't always stellar. Hell, it's rarely great work. But it gives me the practice and the tools to abate my fears so that when the right muse comes along I am ready and willing to give it my best shot. Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice frees your art. Relentless activity depletes that same energy like air escaping from a balloon.

I hope you'll accept what I've written here in the spirit I've intended. We're all on a journey to amaze ourselves. The first step is to choose action over activity.

And by the way...there is no ultimate camera choice.

Kirk

Retro memory day. Here's a link for a post I wrote for Michael Johnston's site over eleven years ago. It's my take on LED lights after just publishing the first photography book about the same. Enjoy?

 https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2012/04/led-lighting-for-photography-kirk-tuck.html#comments

I love predicting the future. Sometimes it actually works out. 

I'm sure there's still a curmudgeon out there somewhere who is "waiting" for LEDs for photography to be "perfected." 

You had me at Latte.

 

shoes.