By the time I finish writing this post the VSL blog will have hit 30,000,000 direct page views. We've also tallied up nearly 58,000 comments from readers (and trolls) and have written over 5500 posts. That's a lot.

 

Under the railway bridge in the park.

just another morning in Austin, Texas. And some guy with an older camera and a mismatched lens walking around in yet another pair of odd hiking shoes sucking in oxygen and snapping images of stuff he might like to look at more thoroughly once he gets home...

And here's a little something to inspire you to exercise: https://neurosciencenews.com/fitness-neuroscience-23228/

Hi all. We seem to have made it over the hump and hit my target of 30 million page views even quicker than I thought we would. Sorry for the King Charles post. I just couldn't help it. All the mass media was so damn serious about the coronation. Probably a lot more exciting to see it all in person than on a screen...

And I don't really hate pickle ball so profoundly. In fact, I don't "hate it" at all. I only dislike it.  A lot.

No one ever  uses mobile phones for their original purpose anymore so instead of chatting with an art director who has been slow to respond, and light on details for a scheduled shoot, my first task this morning was to get in touch, via email and give him a little push toward moving forward on an upcoming shoot or releasing the hold date so we can both move on, productively, with our lives. After that you know what comes next. Yes, it's swim practice. 

I went off script today and swam solo at Barton Springs. The big, natural, spring fed pool in the middle of town. It's about an eighth of a mile long, about 70°(f), and today was not at all crowded. I used hand paddles and a pull buoy because I was totally focused on the front catch of my freestyle stroke. I'm sure that's too much information for most but the front catch sets up the power of the full stroke and is vital to fast swimming. Every once in a while one needs to break from the group and concentrate completely on the fundamental techniques in order not to get sloppy. Sloppy leads to bad technique which leads to disappointment and micro-quitting. I wasn't looking for yardage; just working on technique, but I did manage to get a couple miles in before calling it a day.

The pool was refreshing and different from my routine. I am happy to say that I didn't physically run into any of the other swimmers and I consider that an achievement since there are no lane lines and no lines on the bottom of that natural pool to guide swimmers onto the straight and true path. Literally, not figuratively. 

After the swim I changed into walking clothes, dropped the swim gear in the car, grabbed my camera which I had (yes!) left in the car, on the front seat, along with a hat, and went for a short walk around the lake. The camera I was playing with today was the Leica SL which has become my go-to, favorite camera. I paired it with the new-ish 28mm Carl Zeiss ZM lens because I've lately fallen under the spell of the wider focal length. I never thought this would happen to me, especially since I've so often expressed my undying love for the 50mm focal length --- but there it is. 

There are several things I've come to like about the 28mm focal length. The one I have for the SL is made for M series cameras and I use it with an adapter. But since it's an M series lens it's much smaller and lighter than lenses made for DSLRs or big mirrorless cameras. I was worried at first about the corner performance of the CZ lens but have since found the lens profile for this particular lens in the lens correction menu of Lightroom Classic and am now very comfortable with all the optical black magic of the lens and camera combination. While reviewers who were incompetent enough to try and use the lens with a Sony mirrorless camera body and then announced that corner performance sucked I did make an effort to do a bit of research and to match the lens to a camera body that was engineered to compensate for the different way in which older lens designs interact with various filter stacks in full frame cameras. Everything led me to the SL and SL2 cameras as good solutions for overall imaging quality with what are, really, excellent quality lenses. 

The other thing I've come to like (again) with manual focusing 28mm lenses is the ability to stop down the aperture to f8.0, set the focus to 10 or 15 feet and get nearly every shot in focus from front to back with little need to tweak. But old habits seems to have me magnifying and double-checking many shots ---- because I have the time and --- just in case. Being able to effectively use the vast depth of field is so, so, so much better than being dependent on auto focus. At least for me. 

The weather here has been dicey as of late. We're constantly presented with forecasts of thunder storms only to go on getting gray skies and near misses. Just enough rain to put the kibosh on random outdoor plans but not enough to keep the lawns moist. The moisture thing is now forecast to happen in a big and dramatic way on Saturday; this weekend. The Met. Sages are predicting something like five inches of hard rain midday. Enough to cause flooding on many of the local, low lying roadways in the area. Not to worry, we're up in the hills here and 400+ feet above sea level. Any flooding we get is localized to puddles in the yards or small messes as a result of foundation lines being too low and water not moving away fast enough. 

But all the more reason to do my 28mm walk today since it's a lens that's not stated to be water proof or even water resistant and the use of an adapter compounds that deficiency. 

I am, overall, thrilled with the look generated by the 28mm as I used it this morning. It's sharp and makes very detailed files. The lens profile in the LRC lens correction menu is great and takes care of both geometric distortion as well as "dodgy" corners. I especially love how small and discreet the lens is, even on a bigger body such as the SL.

Rendering depth. A wide angle thing I think.

Rendering nice red. A Leica SL thing I think.

It's been a rough month for me. B has been spending half her time in San Antonio helping to take care of her mom. It's not fun for her and in my case it makes for a fragmented schedule and a fragmented mind. I'm always anticipating her arrival and then her departure and I can't seem to get much done. Other than clean the house and restock the now-working GE refrigerator. Clients are in the wait and see mode about assignments. They'd like to see if we're going to have a debt ceiling deal, see if we're going to head into a crippling recession, and waiting to see if they can just toss everything over to a staff member with an iPhone and a generative A.I. program. 

I don't really care which way the whole thing goes it's just hard to decide on a pathway in the moment. Too much is in flux. Not ready to totally retire but no longer ready to put up with much nonsense either. We'll call 2023 a year of research and exploration. 

Crappiest thing in the moment is the looming expiration of my passport. I need to get it renewed but I'm in that wilderness between deciding that now is the time to send in the old one with the renewal forms or whether I should make a few quick trips to get it out of my system and then apply at the very last minute. 

I explored the path of 'urgent' renewal but appointments to do that are far and few in the Texas area. I'd almost stand a better chance flying somewhere in Canada and then accidentally losing or destroying my passport and then throwing myself on the mercy of the consular system. But that would be unethical and maybe illegal. So I'll muddle through. With my luck the day I ship everything off I'll get asked to do a cool job with half naked super models in Istanbul or Tokyo. And I'll have to wave off the clients for the seven to nine weeks it currently takes to get a new passport back in one's hands; not counting the shipping.

I know, I know. It's very much a first world problem. I just remember fondly the days when there was a hidden office at the state capitol building that would handle this sort of thing for legislators. Little known was the fact that it was illegal to restrict the service from the general public so they just did a good job hiding it. I used it several times for renewals and one could get a passport in a week from start to finish. There was also a driver's license renewal service there. Both are gone now. But much mourned by me.

I got a lot of mail from people here who want me to continue blogging. I'll try to make it work as long as I have clients to talk about and am doing stuff that might translate into good blog material. The last five years, from around the time of my mom's passing, through the year and half of caregiving for my dad, followed by a couple years of Covid pandemic and now B's mom, have put a huge damper on my ability and desire to prospect for new clients and have limited the amount of photography, external to the central Texas area, I been able to accept. Seems like I always needed to be here waiting for "the other shoe to drop." It's a bitch being responsible and responsive. It sucks to always try and do "the right thing." But there it is. 

Food trucks. None of the amenities of regular restaurants but all of the prices. 

The average food truck price for a quarter pound hamburger in Austin now is

$12-$14 dollars. Makes McDonalds seem like a charity. And no restrooms...no air conditioning.

I do have a request for members here. I'm as much of a blog reader as anyone else but I've run out of good photography blogs to follow. MJ seems to be struggling to find a direction that's more about photography and less about personal trials and tribulations and while I will continue to read his blog and support him I am also looking for blogs that I may have overlooked but which you think have great photographic value. I like to read about new gear, techniques, new approaches to business, etc. If you have suggestions to pass along I'd love to hear them. At the base, here at VSL, I've tried to stay centered on the core strength of the blog which I think of as all things photographic. 

The one thing I am not interested in is constantly looking backwards at the recent and not so recent history of photography. I won't typically be directing you to a Walker Evans retrospective or an Ansel Adams show. We've all been there and we've all seen that. If you haven't you need to get a good book about the history of photography and dig in. I've researched it (deeply), taught it at "Uni" (which we Americans call: Universities or Colleges), lived it (Russell Lee and Garry Winogrand were both instructors at UT) and written about it. Now I want to see who is on the front lines today. Not who did something we all know about 40 or 50 years ago. Same with cameras. What's driving photography now? We can dive into recent cameras (last 20 years?) but I don't see myself pounding the keyboard to dribble out yet another article about how good the Hasselblad 500CM was back in the day... Nor pretty much about film of any kind. 

So, if you know someone good on YouTube or with a written blog and you'd like to share with us please put it in a comment below. It might help more people than just me. 

Loving those reds....

This "convenience store" on Barton Springs Rd. has been there for decades.

They are far more than a conventional quick stop store. They have a massive collection of good wines, fresh foods, real, fresh coffee, good quality pastries and much more. A treasure.

One should be able to tell that by their signage. 

Barton Springs Pool. What a wonderful place to start out the day.

Even without a first cup of coffee. But now there's a food trailer just 

outside the fence for that....

Notice the nice lens correction via the LRC lens profiles. Nice. 

Makes the lens much, much better. A good reason to shoot raw.

A walk  through paradise gardens. Now just need A.I. to add the little 

boy and little girl holding hands, a la Eugene Smith...

So, the long and short of it all is that you have me writing stuff here for the foreseeable future. First chance I get to travel abroad I'll be taking it and you'll have to suffer through some "hit and miss" delivery stuff. But for now, if I think it's at all interesting I'm going to post. Thank Bob A. in part. He's an inspiration to me now. Spent time on the phone with him early in the month. He's been reading the blog for a long time and let me know how he really feels about it. It's enough to make it work for me.

One thing though. I hate, hate, hate it when I write something caustic, critical or just mean and someone has to rush in and tell me how "disappointed" they are with me. If you think I'm a mix of Buddha, Jesus Christ and Ansel Adams then you've manufactured a standard, an expectation, to which I'll never live up and don't want to. If someone writes something stupid I'm probably going to point it out and since I've never worked in the diplomatic corps (close but no cigar...) I'm not going to be particularly politically correct and all warm and fuzzy. Call me on it at your peril. I am self-aware enough to know when I'm stretching the bounds of propriety and when I'm not. I don't need you to guilt trip me like someone's mom. If I step over the line I'll apologize, sincerely. But I define where my line is. Not you. If your delicate sensibilities will be hurt you might want to find a blander blog. They do exist. Still. 

Not that I want to be the Charles Bukowski of photoblogs but still....

This is as good a place as any to go for a run. The lake through downtown Austin

(Part of the Colorado River) has a series of ever bigger loops to choose from. From 2.9 miles to 12+ miles. All it takes is a pair of shoes and, in the Summer, a water bottle. 

Thanks to everyone who commented in the last month. The site runs on your energy as much as mine. When there's no feedback loop or metric of engagement my own writer-reactor system slows down and gets gummy. I appreciate all the hoopla lately. It's good. 

Signing off now to go do a "happy hour" with the former CFO of my old advertising agency. We've kept up for decades. Mutual admiration society. Or the expectation that the other person will pick up the tab for the bottle of wine and the cheese plate. Kinda works that way too. In a good way. We'll check in and make sure each is doing well. Then we'll toast to our long, happy ownership of certain equities we've held long enough to see a 3200% return from and we'll imagine (just in the moment) that we're smart instead of just lucky....

The under belly of the pedestrian bridge across Lady Bird lake. 

Cloudy days are good for shots like this.

OT: Pickle Ball. A fun "pseudo" sport or harbinger of the collapse of modern civilization. Discuss.

 I first became aware of pickle ball when my swim club re-configured an outdoor basketball court, installed by a vote from a previous board of directors, into a pickle ball court. Much smaller, dimensionally, than a tennis court and with a similar net crossing it and dividing it into two sides, the court is like a tiny tennis court for pixies who don't wish to move far. Which is probably a benefit to the people I have seen engaged in the game. They seem not to want to run very far or very fast when playing. They are further helped in this endeavor by the construction of the balls which are plastic and have holes in them. What we would have called a "whiffle ball." It's hard to imagine a person sustaining an injury from an errant whiffle ball strike as the balls are neither dense nor heavy. And have no sharp corners with which to put an eye out...

To my mind this new game is analogous to "water aerobics", a pass time for people who are not happy to "break a sweat" and who communally conspire never to raise their heart rates about 80 bpm. Although just spending time in the water might be more healthful.

Pickle Ball arrived on the scene and into the public consciousness as quickly as did Rep. George Santos. And delivered to me the same feelings.  I have just seen my first ads for real estate developments which brag about their shiny, new Pickle Ball courts. No doubt this will join bowling in the Olympics. Games shabbily masquerading as sports. Sports ingenuously masquerading as fitness. 

Maybe this droll game was introduced to distract people from inflation, the threat of recession and the instability of global alliances right now. If so it's, in my mind, a poor substitute for just heading to the local bar and getting plastered. At least in those instances there is money changing hands and at least tangentially buoying the local economies. 

I have nothing against people wanting to waste their time and energy. I have the same regard for croquet and snooker. But I draw the line when people who are soon to be demoted from friends to acquaintances, or from acquaintances to Trumpian, "I never met them. I have no idea who they are or where they came from!" badger me to join them in their misguided pursuit of whiffle activities. Or try to engage me in conversations about the positive attributes of whifflage. Or breathlessly (not as a result of pickle ball) exclaim that "it's the fastest growing sport in the country..." 

I can only imagine that this is yet another attempt to assuage the boredom of traditional religion by creating a (semi) active activity to replace it. 

I'm too busy to start pushing a legislative initiative to ban pickle ball but wanted my gentle readers to understand how pernicious this new activity is. This, along with other aimless faux sports, are dangerous because they give rise to the assumption that people are getting some sort of healthy exercise. 

There are few true sports. They consist mostly of running, swimming, track and field events, maybe basketball because the players run a lot, and, of course, swimming. Did I already mention swimming? 

Pickle ball serves to demean the real sports. We must be on guard.

Alert: quasi, but not completely quasi satire. Play PB if you want to just try not to talk about it in polite company. We really aren't interested. 

Do you play? Was it a court mandated punishment?

If the UK made no cars of their own would King Charles be willing to drive a Chevy Camaro? Not a stock, base model but the top of the line, in full sport trim! What car (other than UK models) do you think King Charles should drive?

He would be driving it himself in this scenario and not just riding in the back. And now that I think about it the back seats would be too cramped for a comfortable riding  situation.

Your thoughts?

Me? No dog in the hunt. Just came to mind as I was stuffing errata into my pockets in prep for a walk...

Is it really King Charles or is it "The Wiz"?

 

I saw this absolutely ridiculous, laughable, embarrassing "portrait" of King Charles in my news feed and it immediately reminded me of a Jerry Seinfeld episode in which the 'Elaine' character dates a guy who turns out to be "The Wiz", an over the top spokesperson on a TV commercial for discount furniture. The resemblance is remarkable. 

I guess it's okay to still have a monarchy. It probably beats the sheer horror of our previous president. But at the same time modern, sane and tasteful citizens of the U.K. must be very uncomfortable having their grown up leaders dressing up like this. Just an observation. Charles in full regal drag.

complaints about the post? See our subscription department...

Better camera? Or better frame of mind?

Eeyore's Birthday Party 2019.

I went to the big Spring celebration at Pease Park that's called, Eeyore's Birthday Party. It was about a week and a half ago. I took a fancy camera from a posh name brand. To be honest, just about everything I shot with the smart, well built, $5,800 camera was crap. Stuff I could have shot back in the 1980s on Kodak Gold color negative film and any old SLR. My brain just wasn't in the game. I've become jaded. It's been harder to enjoy plain stuff. Harder to be part of the crowd.

I didn't realize I'd become such a stuck in the mud until I came across this old folder of images from just four years ago. The way I've been thinking about things has been quite different since the death of my father, the Covid pandemic, the Trump years, and the general collapse of civilization. I know it's just my skewed point of view but when I can clearly see that I was having much more fun with a Canon G15 point and shoot camera than a gleaming Leica Q2 it made me pause and reconsider....everything. 

I've been writing a blog with no real road map and no plan. I endlessly (really, daily) moderate comments that tell me that: I'm not a particularly good photographer. My black and white works sucks. My observations are boring. My chosen subject matter is stupid. Disregarding my long and deep history with photography; both hands on, professionally and in academia, commenters still suggest I look up obvious, historic photographers to "help" me improve my "vision." The commenters only seem to like the most mainstream techniques. Any variation from the YouTube/DPR technical standards is met with ridicule and disparagement. My motives called into question. It's been about six years since I took away all affiliate links or ads of any kind from the blog and I still get accused, regularly, of being a "shill" for some camera company. Still accused of writing about some camera or lens as click bait for sales. I guess it's always been this way. It's just today, looking how much fun I was having back even in 2019 makes me a bit sad. 

I went back into the house a few minutes ago and found the G15 in my desk drawer along with three fairly recent batteries and a charger. I put a card in it, stuck the batteries on a charger and, after I see B off again (Florence Nightingale)  I'll head out and play with it, carrying with me a total disregard for any opinions the resulting images might generate. It's beautiful outside. I'm tired of writing unsolicited stuff about photography for an audience I've mostly never met. I just want to shoot some stuff for myself today. Turn off the news feed, unplug the landline, leave the mobile phone in the desk drawer and forget everything I've ever learned about doing photography "correctly." 

I know most of the VSL readers are smart, compassionate people. I know I should have a thicker skin when moderating comments. But that's not the way I'm wired. Taking a deep breath. 

 

A fun cartoon from the New Yorker...

 

It feels that way sometimes.

Still playing around with yesterday's images from the SL and the Zeiss 28mm Biogon. I wonder what they look like in black and white. Oops. Excuse me! I wonder what they look like in monochrome.

 

Apropos of nothing, I was once a newspaper delivery boy. I was reminded of that this morning when B and I were out for our walk through the hills in our neighborhood. It was during my fresh man year of high school. I delivered the San Antonio Express News and the New York Times to some of the homes in my community. Almost everyone took the local paper back then. About a quarter also took the Times.

It was not my favorite job, looking back. I had to get up well before sunrise, gather up the papers that were dropped off via a big, white truck, roll them and bind them with string or twine to keep them from coming apart and blowing away, then stuff them into the wire baskets on my bicycle and peddle off into the darkness to get them to the subscribers in time to read over breakfast. It was a neighborhood of assorted professionals and business owners and they mostly seemed to be early risers. I'd catch hell if the papers weren't on the driveways or on the front porches by the time the sun came up. Older guys in ties needed their fix of daily news...

Sometimes I would sleep through my alarm clock and my father (one of the early risers) would gently shake me awake and make sure I got up. A couple of times I came down with a cold or the flu and I remember my dad very professionally assessing my condition and telling me to go back to sleep. Before heading in to work at the hospital those mornings he went out with my paper address list, found the papers, bound them and delivered them. In his suit and tie. Never complained. 

The early mornings I dreaded most were the ones during which it was raining, sleeting, snowing or otherwise wet. If we had rain, or strongly suspected there would be rain, I would have to roll the papers up and then insert each newspaper into a waterproof, plastic sleeve. If there was a lot of news on a day like that, or a lot of advertising circulars, getting the rolled papers into the sleeves took a lot of time and ingenuity. It was an "art" I never truly mastered.

There was something odd about collecting the money from people at the end of each month. I'd have a ledger from the newspaper that laid out how much each house owed for their papers. The best time to catch everyone at home was the dinner hour since so few people routinely went out to eat back then. Most people expected to see me and had an envelope with cash in it next to the front door so they could hand it to me when I rang the door bell. Some people played hard to get and inadvertently taught me the time value of money...  The best customers were friends and co-workers of my father. They routinely tipped me more than the cost of their bills. And they were kind and supportive.

My job throwing papers onto driveways lasted from the end of 8th grade, through the long Summer, and up to the day I tried out for the high school swim team. I made the cut and had to abandon my early "career" in "journalism" because in order to be on the swim team I had to make it to both of the daily practices. The first practice started at 5:30 a.m. A direct conflict to early newspaper delivery...

My father suggested I write a "thank you" note to each of my customers explaining my schedule change and giving them the telephone number to call if they didn't get their paper on time. I took his advice and learned a bit about the value of good customer relations when I subsequently dated some of the former customers' daughters, or applied for Summer jobs in the following years at some of their companies. 

The most valuable lessons I learned doing the newspaper delivery gig were: You get a lot more done if you get up early. Making your own money is fun and empowering. Being organized and disciplined smooths out some of the inevitable bumps in life and makes the day-to-day work easier. And, finally, it's really wonderful to know my dad always had my back. And he did for many decades afterwards. I tried to return the favor whenever I could.

My next Summer job was lifeguarding. That was a lot more fun.