For all those who dislike black and white..... Here are color shots from the walk on Monday. Same specs....Q2. Hot day. Heat Index in the .... uncomfortable zone. Click to see em larger.

the road less traveled.

I include this as the George W. Bush Commemorative guard rail. It was at this site many years ago that Gov. Bush was running along with his security detail when a garbage truck took the curve too fast and jumped the curb, barely missing the future president. If not for the quick reflexes of his security team we might never have had the war in Iraq... And what a loss that would have been for Halliburton...

Upside down growing vines.

Taking a vacation from writing. Turning off comments. Chilling out while the weather is iffy. Posting just images from time to time. See you in a little while.

 

Warning: Graphic swimming pool photographs. NSFW !!!

There is something uplifting and life affirming about jumping into a cool pool during the depths of Summer. Of course I would also say there is something joyous and life affirming about diving into a warmish pool in the dead of winter --- when there is ice on the deck and cloud of steam hanging over the water. Seasonally contextual, for sure. 

I was rooting around in the photo cupboards last evening just to see what had "fallen through the cracks" when I came upon a TTArtisan 21mm f1.5 lens complete with an L mount. I had almost forgotten this one and I think I know why. It's soft in the corners. Really soft. Even at f8.0 it's soft. That must have bothered me when I first got it but now it seems eccentric and whimsical instead of flawed and impaired. 

I stuck the lens on a Leica SL2 and headed out the door to swim practice today. The water was three or four degrees hotter than it was on Sunday morning. That just goes with the territory when the heat dome drops by to torture us. 

Jen was our coach. She's mean. Not bad mean, just "get to work" mean. She's out to make sure malingering is not actively practiced at her workouts. If you've come to stand around you've come to the wrong place....

Our main set was tough because of the water temp. We ended up doing 16 x 150 yards with each set of four descending. Which means you start out at a comfortable pace and then each 150 yard swim is supposed to be faster/harder. We managed. But just barely. 

Toss in a warm-up set and a cool down at the end and we still managed to get in a couple miles; even with the uncomfortable temperature.

After I got out, got dressed and drank more water I walked out to the car and grabbed the Leica off the front seat of the VSL staff car and shuffled back to the pool deck just to see if my memory of the TTA 21mm was accurate. Yep! The center can be nice and sharp but at medium distances, even at f8.0, the performance of the lens in the corners just flat out sucks. The trade off, at least for me, is that I can set the lens to f8.0, set the manual focus ring to about 8 feet and be in focus from something like 4 feet all the way out to infinity. It's "point and shoot" simplified. And who really pays attention to anything in the corners anyway ---- except for my friends who are architecture photographers?

So much potential for fun in a quiet pool. Just waiting for swimmers to show up...

that's usually my lane. It's lane #4. I share it with several other crazy people. 

Why do I write, "crazy"? How else to explain that we keep showing up and swimming

and I've forgotten at this point what exactly we're there to achieve but we show up and

do it anyway. Maybe we dream that we'll get faster as we get older. Or that 

some miracle will occur and our technique will improve so much that we 

can re-live the swims of our youth. It's a beguiling target; I'll say that. 

Ben more of less grew up at this pool. I spent ten years on the board of directors.

I've probably done 8200 practices over the 28 years I've been swimming there. 

At some point you'd think I'd get it all figured out but there is always something

to work on. Something new to learn. In that respect it's a lot like photography...

sometimes, after workout, I'll grab a cup of coffee from a shop that's close to 

the swim club and sit out here on the deck just breathing in the day and 

enjoying being outside. I guess it's like meditating. 

Save me a spot at the table....

No lenses were harmed in the creation of this blog post. 

Another hot day on tap. You can already feel it at 9:30 in the morning...

 

A quick pop of color for all those tormented by yesterday's display of black and white images...

 

boats at the boat dock on the north shore of Lady Bird Lake.

Just across from Austin High School. Right off the Hike n Bike trail.

Always eager to please my generous readers I did not forget to include some color photographs while walking across the surface of the sun.

This is a big boat dock from which people can rent paddle boats, kayaks, rowing sculls, etc. On the weekends the human propelled boat traffic on the lake in the middle of the city is enormous. No individual gas motor craft are allowed. Which is quite nice. And quieter. 

Not to worry, there are several nearby lakes on which power-boating delinquents and jet ski hooligans can scream around like banshees. 

These images were taken with the Q2 using the .DNG setting. The lens is pleasant. The body even more so. 

More color to come. Apparently by popular demand...

Gotta Get Acclimated at Some Point.... Might as well lighten the load with a compact camera. Johnston inspired monochrome. (AKA: Black and White).

 

Random Plywood. 

We had some nice days in Austin just before and then including the weekend. Highs in the mid-90s instead of the triple digitals. Even the oppressive humidity took a welcome break. The water temp in the pool dropped into the pleasure zone and I didn't break a sweat upon stepping outside the front door of the house. But that meteorological ceasefire is over and this week the heat dome is back in business; testing our patience, our endurance and the capacity of the electric grid. We have high hopes for all three.

When the first heat wave hit a couple of weeks ago I wasn't mentally prepared for the sudden onslaught of the change. I mostly swam early in the mornings, hit the (very) air conditioned gym and spent the rest of the time indoors. It dawned on me that I had more or less surrendered. 

In years past I'd start in the middle of the Spring and gradually build up a resistance to the heat. I'd walk four or five miles in the afternoons as the temperatures increased over days and weeks. Nothing all at once. When I was much younger B. reminds me that I thought nothing of going out for a run in this kind of boiling muck but now I am either much wiser or I have just become more chicken... That's okay. I think it's mostly about self-preservation. 

I got out and did a bunch of walking during the respite last week and today I decided to ramp up the acclimation process instead of spending another week or two hiding behind the curtains and looking nervously at the weather forecasts on my phone.

The "real" temperature right now is 102° Fahrenheit. The "feels like" or heat index reading is at 109°. It was a little bit cooler around noon when I headed out for today's adventure in the great outdoors. I took a bottle of water, a phone (a rarity for me but I guess I bought into the idea that if something bad happened I could at least call for help....), the mandatory wide-brimmed (non-Silly-Tilley) hat and the camera choice of the moment was the Leica Q2 masquerading as a Monochrom camera. 

I walked the three mile loop and added an additional mile and a half by parking far from the hike and bike trail at the lake. Barton Springs Pool was hoping and there were a surprisingly stout number of folks walking on the hike and bike trail. Water fountains every mile and lots of shade trees along the route. Not too bad. 

The Q2 seemed to ignore the heat and function perfectly. Loving the Monochrom HC profile setting (stands for high contrast) and today I set it at the default instead of adding that one step of contrast I normally do. It's really a wonderful little camera. 

Dead tree on the disk golf course. (and two more below). 

Crossing under Mopac Expressway to get back to my car. Which was like an oven.

Thank goodness it's white. And I even had the windshield shade up.

Over the course of a one hour walk I drank 32 ounces of water. 

Stopped at a fountain and soaked my pretty hat as well. 

Thank goodness I supplemented with some magnesium this morning. 

From the pedestrian bridge roundabout. Spiraling down is always more fun that taking the stairs...

Glancing through the fence at Barton Springs. 

Barton Springs Pool. Glorious. 

The Zilker Hillside Theater.

Yeah. The message is pretty clear. Don't park here...

What?!? Nobody wants to picnic in the direct sun and in the 103° temps?

But they do still want to play disk golf. Nice. 

Rock Dolphin. 

I made it back to the house with no ill effects. The camera worked well. The Keen hiking shoes were perfect. The hat sublime. Back out tomorrow to do a different location. New lens arrived. Will be testing. Or playing. Either is correct. 

Generic Placebo. The name of my new garage band. Or... a bold, new marketing initiative?

 It was the heat. I blame it on the heat. That's why I forgot to include some much needed information about this image when I posted it a few days ago on another blog post. This is an example of what some photographers take pictures of when they go through their days always keeping a camera over the shoulder, or in close reach. Nothing astounding or earth-shattering. Just an arrangement of roses. But revelatory for me because of what the exif told me later. 

The image was taken with a Leica SL2, a camera that was considered to have very high resolution when it was first introduced. And, as most of us believe, the trade-off of a camera with high resolution (and correspondingly smaller pixels) is that the images generated become noisier as the ISO goes up. Some pundits, having reviewed the SL2 for a day or so before rushing to make YouTube "review" suggested that the camera "tops out" at around 1600 ISO and that above that the noise is so repulsive as to render the files unusable. I question just how proficient some "reviewers" are at establishing a correct exposure...

This ho-hum image was taken handheld at ISO 6400. The aperture was f4.0 and the shutter speed was 1/50th of a second. I imported the .DNG file into Lightroom and tweaked a few settings before outputting it here as a Jpeg. I examined the image in Lightroom at 100% (and that's a big file!) and could just start to see some monochromatic (luminance) noise at that magnification. Five seconds with the luminance slider in the LR noise reduction panel rendered it mostly invisible. And that's at 100% magnification.

There are few current APS-C or full frame (35mm) cameras that I can fault for their high ISO performance; unless we start the conversation with the premise that 12,000 or 25,000 ISO are the thresholds for "high ISO." If we stick with normal, very usable ISOs of 1600, 3200 and 6400 I would say that any current, full frame camera does a better than decent job at holding its head above water in that range. 

I have read repeatedly that the Leica SL2-S, because of its lower resolution (24M) and its BSI sensor construction is a much superior low light performer. That may be but coming from earlier generations of digital cameras; and especially those APS-C cameras brought to market in the early 2000s (looking at you, Nikon D2X) I'm so happy not to have to deal with the noise we saw there at ISO 400 that I'm content to cruise along with this level of 6400 ISO noise for a while. Maybe a long while.

Drop down the resolution either in post or when shooting Jpegs and the noise also seems to vanish. 

I'll be offering workshops to YouTube reviewers on "The Power of Not Underexposing." I hope plenty of them sign up. Maybe the first topic will be "Why Underexposing by Two Stops Isn't Bright." (get it?).

As to the headline of this particular post--- it's just nonsense. A fellow swimmer who is also a psychiatrist, was telling a funny story in the locker room after practice about a five gallon jar filled with colored pills that one hospital pharmacy kept behind the counter. A woman came in demanding a refill. Her medicine bottle was clearly marked as "placebo." A young intern checked with the pharmacist who checked records and then "refilled" the prescription with pills from the big jar. (All placebos). 

The woman complained that these pills were a different color than the last batch. The pharmacist quickly replied that these matched the prescription but these were "generic placebos."

In the moment, and told by a witty psychiatrist, I thought the story and the phrase were hilarious. I'm considering launching a P.R. company with the same name. Giving the clients what they deserve...