Sunday organization stops in its tracks as I find a new trove of B. photos from 1979.

 

Muse caught while painting in the studios at UT's College of Fine Arts.

 Art students spent a lot of evening/night time working hard on their projects. While the business majors were out drinking beer the artists were mixing paint, putting gesso on canvases and drinking coffee. You can argue but you would be wrong. It's still the same today. All the cool people seem to work harder.  Artists are motivated by a passion for their projects. Non-artists seem motivated by greed and fear. 

Some of the artists were very beautiful. I've always been amazed by this one in particular...

Sunday morning observation while wading through boxes and boxes of prints from the late 1970's.

Checking out the new adapter and a relatively new lens. How? With photos, of course.

I've been buying up rangefinder lenses lately. Don't know why except that I like the small sizes and the high center sharpness. One thing to be aware of is that most rangefinder lenses, designed for film, have rear elements that sit very close to the sensor planes of modern cameras. The light rays that reach the sensor edges do so at a very oblique angle which means there will be vignetting. Also, some are not as well corrected for even color across the sensor plane so one can experience color drift across the frames. This is mostly seen in the corners. Because of their thick filter packs it's not recommended that one use rangefinder lenses on Sony's current cameras. Just an FYI.

Because of the color shift across the sensor I tend to use these rangefinder lenses with cameras set to raw. The raw files allow me to use dedicated lens profiles in Lightroom Classic. You don't get the same options when processing Jpeg files. It's a good reason to shoot raw when using this older tech.

I didn't really pay as much attention as I should have to some of the issues that crop up when using lenses initially designed for film rangefinders. I have successfully adapted several different types of SLR and DSLR lenses to L mount cameras with complete success. These include Canon FD lenses and a range of Nikon F lenses (any Nikon lens, or Voigtlander lens in a Nikon F mount, that has an external aperture ring!). These adaptations give good results and it's only a very rare lens that shows any color shift across the sensor. I expected to get the same performance from M mount rangefinder lenses adapted to the L mount. It didn't work out that way. I had some "teething issues" getting started.

The first M mount lens I picked up was a brand new Voigtlander 40mm f1.4 Nokton lens. I bought an inexpensive, Urth M to L mount adapter and then took that lens and a Panasonic S5 on a vacation trip to Vancouver. I didn't notice until I got to my destination that the lens in the adapter was able to focus past infinity. That's okay, I guess. I'm pretty vigilant about nailing exact focus so not having the hard stop wasn't a disaster. But it did preclude my sometimes practice of zone focusing. I couldn't depend on the distance scale on the lens. It was all shifted by about 3 or 4 feet away from infinity (and beyond). This also altered the system's close focusing abilities. Now I could not focus anywhere near as close as I should have been able to. 

I never had a focus issue with any of the dozens of adapters I've been using since around 2009 so my first thought was that the lens was mis-calibrated. But then I read grumblings around the web about the "inaccuracy" of M mount adapters when it comes to focusing. Many makers of the adapters can machine their products to high standards but choose engineer them to allow lenses to focus past infinity because poorly calibrated rangefinder cameras are sometimes part of the problem. Armed with the consensus that there is wild variation in the calibration of the adapter rings for M lenses I experimented with two different varieties of Fotodiox adapters and also an additional Urth adapter. All of them allowed for focusing beyond where infinity should have been. All limited my close focusing capability.

My next step was to borrow a couple of Leica M lenses which were known to be very accurately focus calibrated. They exhibited the same behavior as the 40mm VM lens. At that point I came to understand that adapter makers live in fear that their customers won't be able to focus on infinity so they err in that direction while gutting the attached lenses' close focusing abilities. An interesting trade-off.

In all my reading there were two exceptions to the prevailing fashion of adapter compromise. One was from Hoage. They make an M to L adapter that does hit right at infinity but also provides a helicoid ring that allows for a range of close focusing distances as well. Adapter meets close focus ring. I ordered one for $89 and tested it. It's perfect. It's perfect as long as you make sure the helicoid is set for infinity. If you bump the assemblage in the camera bag or with your hand you will end up moving the ring off infinity and into the close-up regions. That's fine if you are carefully focusing through an EVF but if you are using zone focusing techniques it can make for a lot of out-of-focus frames... A LOT.

I liked the accurate infinity focus stop of the Hoage adapter and bought a second one for one of the other rangefinder lenses I've recently picked up. 

But the other exception to the sloppy adapter rings was the one I heard most often and that was about the Leica branded M to L adapter. While all the other adapters are "dumb" adapters that transfer no information between lens and cameras the Leica model has pass through electronic contacts that allow a Leica lens with coding (lens model) to communicate with a Leica camera. Across all the current interchangeable lens cameras. Attach a current Summicron via the Leica adapter and it will tell your Leica SL2 or M11 which lens it is and what kind of profile it needs to cut down on vignetting, correct distortion and cure color shift across the frame. While this is all well and good for Leica owners with recent vintage M series Leica lenses all it does for me in the moment is add cost to an adapter. 

But I decided to buy one to see if it was as accurate as so many other users declared. Would it stop neatly and accurately at infinity? Was it worth a new price of $450? Was it worth the $325 I paid for a mint condition used one?

The Leica adapter arrived yesterday around noon and after a hard day at the office (nap, novel reading, web browsing, snacking) I attached the adapter to an SL2 on one side and the Carl Zeiss 35mm f2.0 Biogon ZM to the other side and walked over to the UT Campus area to make a bunch of photos before the light faded away. 

Yes. The Leica adapter is as accurate as its reputation suggests. I can confidently hit infinity and I can also, happily, zone focus. I kind of expected, for the price, that it would deliver. 

But, since the adapter is not transferring any information from the lens to the camera I found that some of the corners of Jpeg images had turquoise color casts. I switched to (dot)DNG (raw files) and then pasted the exact lens correction found in the Lightroom lens profiles across the entire folder of imported files. It worked very well. Now I could get to work post processing without distraction. The profile cleaned up things nicely!

I'll likely use this adapter most with the 40mm and 35mm lenses since I use them most. When I shoot with the CZ 28mm Biogon ZM lens I am slower and more careful so I'll be fine using the Hoage adapter with that one. I reflexively check the adapter now, from time to time, to make sure it's firmly stopped at infinity. I tend to shoot more off the cuff with the other two lenses. The Leica adapter will compensate for my sloppy handling.

So, what have I found out about shooting with the 35mm lens now that I have a proper adapter in the mix? That it's quite sharp, the colors are very rich, the size and layout are perfect for me, and that I like the lens very much. So, all good here. Now ready to go out shooting --- as soon as that new passport hits the mail box. 

Swim comments and more below....

St. Austin's Church is somewhere on the other side of this protected 

pedestrian walkway. Hence the paintings on this side. Always lots of color 

in urban Austin. 

If you take a moment to enlarge and really look at the image just above you'll see that the 

lens profile works well, that the lens is quite sharp, and that the colors are wonderful.

The SL2 really is a nice camera to use with the rangefinder lenses. It's nice to be

able to view through a very high resolution EVF. 

At one point, in the late 1970's, I lived at the 21st Co-op. It was pretty modern back then. And very "green" for the times. We actually had a solar water heating system which consisted of most of the roof areas covered by metal boxes which had black pipes running their lengths in between mirrored reflectors. The sun would heat the pipes which would heat the water and the water was then pumped into a 20,000 gallon, very well insulated, storage tank. The system worked well. Even in the winter month (not a typo.. it really only got very cold about one month out of the year). 

Since it was a co-op we all had to sign up for jobs. My girlfriend and I volunteered to cook breakfast twice a week for nearly 60 residents. We even made donuts from scratch one day. It was a fabulous place to live and only a five minute walk to campus. 

The 21st Street CO-OP is still there. Now it's behind metal gates and it's starting to show its age.

The 21st Street property was one of many co-op living set-ups close to campus. A "flagship" in its day. Some others were a lot more barebones. The next two images are just details of another old house adjacent to 21st Street which is also a co-op. It's a fun idea for housing and dining. You just have to make sure that your co-op is organized and that everyone pulls their own weight....

Around the corner from my old co-op is the Ark co-op. It's bigger and used to be the Tri-Delta sorority house back in the 1960s. It's built around a big central court yard with a swimming pool. Friday and Saturday parties at the poolside were legend around campus. The Ark is where several of my friends and I built a co-operative darkroom, complete with an Omega D2 Enlarger. Legend is that the room we converted to a fully functional darkroom was once the dorm room of actor, Farah Fawcett. The rumor was that she was expelled from the Tri-Delts for sleeping with an African American football player. Never solidly proven but still a rumor swirling around the property to this day....

Sadly, the darkroom is no longer there. Sign of the times. 

The area just to the West of the UT campus is now a jungle of enormous dormitories that are more like luxury hotels than any dorm I ever set foot in. I walked by one multi-story development that even featured valet parking for the students. Must be nice....Gotta take care of those Lambos.

Swim news. Another gray day. The water was too warm at 83°. But one of my favorite coaches was on deck and writing a fun workout. J.T. swam for UT and graduated about a year and a half ago. He's working for a software company but still coaches Saturday mornings and fills in at other times. 

He writes workouts that mix up short and long distance sets so we get some endurance work mixed with speed work. I did too much ab strength training at the gym on Thursday and I could really feel it as I stretched out and swam freestyle this morning. It's always a bittersweet experience to do good strength training. Mostly sweet and not very bitter. You get to be sore but you also get to experience a better core, more stroke control and better rotation in your stroke. Some core work and a lot of lat work and you can count on faster swims. 

Ben recommends doing push ups every day. 50 or 60 of them. Now that I'm spending time at the gym doing strength training I've lowered my push-up target to two sets of 20. That seems to be enough to maintain for now. 

All good here. No other news to report. Not yet, anyway.

 

 

New Hobby: Tossing out stuff. Trying to figure out how to give away gear in a milieu when no one really wants studio lights, softboxes and light stands....

I find myself embarrassingly over-equipped given my desire to simplify and reduce clutter. How to manage bags full of generic speed lights (on camera flashes...) and their attendant batteries and chargers? I tried to donate them to four of the many colleges we seem to have here in Austin. I thought they could stick 'em in a box in the photo classes and students could take whatever they needed. But no takers. No longer any big programs just dedicated to photography. And not much interest from dept. heads for on camera flashes.

Then there is the overstock of LED light fixtures. I really only need to keep a couple for my own projects and I never intend to do another paid video project (such a thankless undertaking...) but here I am with four excess, mono-light style fixtures that plug in the wall. But in the current stages of image creation no one seems interested in anything that has to be plugged in. 

And I'm just getting started when it comes to modifiers for lights and other accessories. My tastes tend toward big units. Six foot umbrellas. Seven foot diameter octa-boxes. Six foot by six foot scrims. C-stands (no! I'm not shipping them to you. They weigh ton and you don't need them!). Again, no takers. Not even considering that they would be free.

When it comes to cameras I don't have any issues. Cameras and lenses are small enough to store anywhere and given the cyclical nature of my attention I know I'll pretty much always circle back to re-discover them again and again. 

I used to depend on the local camera store to somehow get unwanted stuff to young photogs just starting out, and to students, but they laid off my favorite sales associate (of the last 15 years) and have also become quite mercenary. The original owners (whom I loved) sold the store to a right wing business zealot who will gladly accept free gear donations but none of them will ever see the hands of a needy first year photographer. Nope, he'd doubtless move whatever I "donated" straight on to the sales floor. And I'd rather just leave the stuff in the street for someone to find than to support the new, fascist, retail regime. In fact, I've gone from trying to buy everything locally to giving up on the far right bricks and mortar owner and sourcing everything but seamless backdrop paper from B&H or some other straightforward, high service organization.

If you are in Austin and wanna be a photographer, and are in school or just out of school, drop a line and we'll see if there is anything you can use. Otherwise, we'll leave it in a pile somewhere near where local, young photographers congregate. 

To recap. Excess gear = bad. Donating = futile. Cameras and lenses = still coveted. Almost all the stuff I want to get rid of is too heavy to cost effectively ship to anyone. And if you read this blog you don't need it because, demographically, you can likely to be able to afford better stuff-- and probably want better stuff. Don't ask me for a list; it's not forthcoming. But if you have ideas for disposing of unwanted gear in local markets, drop a comment.

Today's gear news: The Leica M to L adapter arrived today from CameraWest and was immediately pressed into use putting a Carl Zeiss 35mm f2.0 Bigon ZM lens onto the front of a Leica SL2. It's a wonderful package as the lens makes the whole of the system that much smaller and lighter. Now heading out to shoot it and confirm accurate infinity focusing. If Leica can't get it right with a $450 adapter ring then I'm giving up. 

That's all the news I've got fit to print. Have fun out there. 

Wooden Slats in the Paris Metro.

 

 I photographed this image one evening, after rush hour, in the Paris Metro, under Le Place de L'Étoile back in 1986. I was using a Leica M3, loaded with Tri-X film and sporting a 50mm Summicron lens. It sums up how I feel about work these days. I think I'm sliding into a gradual retirement from standard commercial photography. I'd like to do more commissioned portraits and fine art work. I won't pass up money thrown at me in exuberant abundance but I'm tired of chasing it and I think we have enough. I'll never give up being a photographer.

sometime in the early part of last year I just flat gave up marketing my services to the usual clients. No more mailers. No email blasts. No cocktail parties. No lame Ad Club happy hours. I didn't plan it all out and I didn't really discuss it with anyone but B. I didn't actually need much feedback. My feeling was (and is) that the business of photography had changed so profoundly; at least the way I had always practiced it, that it was no longer "what I signed up for." And it seemed further and further from something fun and challenging and more like a relationship gone sour where one is just going through the motions solely from decades of momentum. 

Even though my advertising pushes disappeared I still was (and am) regularly asked to bid on projects. But once the spark goes out one tends to finally bid jobs for the full amount they should be at. And clients are loathe to pay what the work is really worth. At least that's my perception. 

I could retool and find a new commercial purpose but I'm not particularly interested in ramping up a business again and doing all the hard work of establishing it only to decide, a few years from now, that I'm going to shut it all down anyway. 

The work I really want to do now is more or less like the work just above. Wandering through life with fun cameras and snapping whatever resonates with me in the moment. 

This blog, VSL, started out as a series of posts about the business of selling photographs. The commercial aspects of doing the work. The marketing and the selling. The 'nuts and bolts' of how we produced jobs. Things will change here as I run out of client anecdotes and pratfalls to discuss. I'll be much more self directed in my work and I hope to be discussing how to find one's passion in projects, how to do art, how to show art, and how to embrace the joy of playing with fun cameras and lenses too. 

A number of years ago I wrote a book for Amherst Media called, "The Commercial Photographers Handbook." It was a general guide to the business of photography and it was used by several big college programs as a text book. It was a success in the marketplace and we sold enough of the books to take the rough edges of the Great Recession of 2008-2010 down a notch or two. Enough in royalties to keep my hands off the retirement accounts and still make the mortgage payments and stuff. It was an effective antidote to panic.....as were the other four non-fiction books.

The one thing the book never got around to discussing was "How to Quit." or "How to Wind Down a Profitable Business." There is a secret, I think: Leave in the black. Under your own steam. When you realize that you and the current market are no longer a good match. 

I'm looking forward to fewer scheduling obligations for clients (who love to cancel at the last moment anyway) and more focus on swim practice, time at the gym and time playing with cameras and the resulting images. 

My passport renewal is being expedited. My Global Entry Trusted Passenger card is renewed. Fall 2023 will be the start of a busy travel schedule. (We don't go vacation much in the Summer because that's when everyone else goes. Fall and Spring are our favorite times). 

Just thought I'd let my readers know my direction for now. NOT stopping the blog. It's too much fun. 

I might not be posting any more images on the blog unless I can sort out the "how's and why's" of Google's new Application Changes. I'll explain.

 For the zillions of years I've been writing the blog I've been able to upload as many images as I like with, really, no preconditions. Blogger is a service that has always been offered free of charge by Google but with any free service there are always strings attached. Somewhere...

Usually, when I upload images here it's a very straightforward process. I hit a little photo icon in the menu bar, a window opens and I have choices of where to source my images. The could be on my computer, in a Google archive or in Google Photos. I usually prep the images in a folder on my desktop computer and then upload to the blog post from there. Easy-Peasy. 

Yesterday I decided to photograph a photo of Ben running a race as an illustration for my post about the Sony a77. Once I hit the preference to upload from my computer I got a new window asking me to accept cookies. If I did not accept cookies I could not upload in the way I always have. 

Why not accept the cookies? Well, here's the message I get:

"Cookie Icon

Allow cookies

If you disable cookies, this application won't work properly

Close       Accept."

If I hit accept I get a warning message from my operating system that says accepting these cookies will allow Google.com to track my activities.

Seems pretty sucky to me. An overnight change. No notice. More restrictions. I'm not sure I want to trade the ability to post my images here for Google having access to all my online activities. Which I am sure they are packaging and selling to endless numbers of vendors. I'm pretty sure I'm firmly against the change but I'm going to try some research and see if there are settings I can change to remediate the issue. 

I really like being able to post the images. Not doing that diminishes my interest in blogging here. I'm pretty sure you can understand that since I have uploaded and shown thousands and thousands of images over the years. 

I'll get back to you on this. If you are super tech savvy and have some sort of solution, please let me know in the comments. 

Thanks, Admin Superior

Does anyone remember the Sony SLT-a77 camera?

Ben acing the mile at a high school track meet. 

In the first decade of this century Sony came onto the market with an interesting camera. It was the Sony SLT-a77. The camera had an APS-C sensor and used a semi-transparent pellicle mirror which was permanent and stationary. It did not move when you shot your photos. Part of the light hit the mirror and was directed to a viewfinder/imaging sensor which sent the signal to an EVF. The rest of the image forming light also went through the mirror and struck the same sensor at the back of the camera. At the image plane. Once you hit the shutter it took some time to process and write the file. This caused a blackout or a freezing of the image in the finder.  It was an odd system and I guess it was done to get a mirrorless, non-optical finder experience but one which would allow users who bought the more traditional a850 and a900 cameras to use the same line of lenses on a new type of camera. 

The a77 used a 24 megapixel CMOS sensor in the APS-C size. The gripes from photographers about this kind of system were focused mainly on two things. The first was a long lag time and a finder black out between each frame. Sure, you could shoot at 12 fps but only the first frame would show in the find and it would be held there until you finished your burst. In the opinion of most photographers that lag and resulting blind spot of imaging made the camera impractical for shooting sports. But I am hard headed and decided to use it to record a number of my son's track meet and cross country performances. Learning good work arounds is like solving puzzles. I guess you could get frustrated and turn the table over, scattering the pieces or, you could work with the camera and discover ways to circumvent some of the operational issues. 

In some regards the camera had a lot going for it. The EVF was, at the time, state of the art with 2.36 million dots of OLED resolution. The AF used phase detection which made it fast and accurate to focus. It had micro adjust to fine tune lens to body AF integration. It was big enough to feel good in daily use and it took advantage of a really nice series of lenses. I think Sony can be grateful about their acquisition of Konica-Minolta in that regard. 

I had a couple of the a77 cameras and used them for a wide range of assignments over the course of a couple years. I eventually replaced them with the full frame (and, from an image viewpoint, a stellar file creator!). The things I remember best about using the a77 was how well the camera worked with Sony's 70-200mm f2.8 lens for the system. It was gorgeous. And, of course on the APS-C format camera body it was more like a 100-300mm lens with a blazing fast aperture. They also made a 16-55mm f2.8 that was almost as good. Sadly, when Sony introduced their full-on mirrorless family; the A7 series, those great lenses could only be used with a kludgy adapter that slowed down the AF and added too much bulk for bodies that were already too small. 

There were a number of SLT models at one time, culminating with the full frame, 24 megapixel a99 but in all of the bodies in the system the one major fault that pushed me to move on was their abysmal flash performance. The professionally capable flashes for the SLT series were expensive and fragile. They shut down quickly if they got hot and took a long time to be functional again if you tried to restart them. Not good for an event photographer at a fast moving conference. And when the flashes did work they didn't meter exposures especially well --- if at all. 

At one point I bought a Hasselblad lens converter that would allow me to use V series H-blad lenses on the a77 bodies and I had great fun putting stuff like the 80mm and 100mm Planars on the front. But that got old as the live view wasn't enough magnification to really let me manually focus well enough.

When it came to general photography the cameras were good enough but in theater photography at that time they were tremendous for me because they were the first cameras that offered good live view through the EVF. You could actually judge exposure and color in the viewfinder for pretty much the first time. The a77 and the 70-200mm gave me lots of great theater images but even in that niche the camera stumbled in that its high ISO performance was nothing to write a blog about. Noisy over 800 ISO and even noisier beyond. The a99 was a much better high ISO performer though it's been eclipsed by newer cameras. By a long shot. 

The SLT (Single Lens Translucent) technology was a direct descendant of the Canon RT film camera. That camera used a pellicle mirror solely to increase the cycling speed and eliminate the finder blackout, and the RT was a descendant of the F1 Pellicle which was a special order camera created by Canon for sports photographers. The non-moving pellicle (translucent is a poor translation for the concept) mirror of the F1 was also used to increase the frame rate and also to eliminate viewfinder blackout altogether. Actually great for seeing flash in real time. And if Sony had figured out a way to incorporate electronic viewing AND eliminate the black out between frames they might still have an SLT system out there. Now, with the hyper quick processing of the A7 variants the need has subsided. For the most part. It is important to know that the switch from DSLRs to mirrorless was not entirely direct. The SLTs were an interesting stop gap. 

There are a lot of them (a77) out there in the used market. A quick check shows that they can be had for around $400 to $450 used. Not sure about sourcing the lenses but I bet they are out there too. I'm looking for used a99 cameras and whatever the 50mm f1.4 of the that system was. But I'm not looking too hard. There's better stuff here now. But man, that was a good system for its time. Especially if you could slow down and use it the right way. 

And, yes. I finally figured out that when using an a77 for sports one would have to "lead" the subject by just a bit and then sort of follow the action instinctively during the black out. It could be done. It can be done better with the tools we have today.