I underestimated just how good the Panasonic G9 camera was/is. I took two to Iceland a while back and stumbled across some selections while working on something else. These are from late Fall of 2018.

 

Square photographs. In color. Nicely square. Decorative.

Color Reykjavik 

©2018. Kirk Tuck.

It's fun to make small portfolios from larger collections of photographs. Something entertaining for me to do as I spend an afternoon testing out gear for an upcoming series of photo shoots and mostly charging camera batteries for the same. 

A photographic note for those who are smart, wise, tasteful and educated enough to appreciate Richard Avedon's last big project: "In the American West." 

It was first presented at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Ft. Worth forty years ago. B. and I were there for the opening night as guests of Texas Monthly Magazine. The show was beyond anything I've ever seen in photography world and meeting Avedon was the thrill of a lifetime. 

The same museum is presenting the show again this month, and until the first of October. 

The show was and still is a tour de force. It separated truly aware modernists and photography lovers from art poseurs at the time of its first presentation and, apparently, still does so today. 

If you are a fan of the most culturally significant photographer of the 20th century it's well worth flying in from ----- anywhere to see what all the fuss was about. It's one thing to see the work rendered small and flat in books but quite another to see how 8x10 inch negatives could be masterfully printed and presented in black and white at sizes up to eight feet by ten feet. 

To see the work as it was meant to be seen and not be impressed and amazed is to not understand photography as an art... 

There. I've said it.

We're driving up to see the show again next week. There's a Kimpton Hotel about three miles away that's pretty nice. A great place to spend a couple of days. 

Don't bother to leave a comment that's negative about Richard Avedon. Two things will happen. First I will lose some measure of respect for your ability to appreciate really great photography. Second, unless the comment is so profound that the very words are also a work of art, I will give it a cursory read and then delete it. Ah, the power of the comment curator....

 

 

Walking along the avenue today. Enjoying the lovely weather. It barely hit 100° and the humidity was much lower. A good excuse to meander with a Q2. Captions only.

wickedly sci-fi, b grade movie boot. Love it. At Freebird Boots.

Doesn't matter if I had to park a mile away. I found a meter-free spot with all day shade. 

That's almost "unicorn status" near S. Congress Ave. 

Collection of Air Stream trailers selling food, beverages, crafts and stuff. 

Would be nice if it was cooler. Maybe hopping in January...

I was going to shoot this in "Monochrome." Really; I was. But the photo gods 

came down from photo heaven and kept swatting my finger away from the shutter button

and zapped me with lightening until I came to my senses and set the camera correctly.

I don't even know what this is but it was "shiny" so I photographed it.

revision, revision. I  keep trying to get this trailer shot right but.....

maybe it needs a bikini model out front. 

trying without much success to be a street photographer. 

Thinking of giving it all up to become an influencer.

instant surfing wardrobe shop. Park and sell. 

hat clerk at Maufrais. Convincing. I almost left with a big ole Stetson. 

But I couldn't find one made by Tilley....

coffee, flowers and cowboy hats. A pleasant combination.

a family that sits outside in 100° texting is destined to........?

kinda ditto.

urban landscape interlude.

These guys are so popular now in Austin that they get police motorcycle escorts,

can park across five handicap parking spots and people applaud when they show up....

It's ice!!!! Yay!!!

A commenter asked to see this sign lit up. I didn't know it was kinetic but it has two pairs of 

legs. See below for captivating details. Or come to Austin and stare at the sign with me for 

hours....

wishful thinking...

according to a clerk: tourist from out of town are the main customers. 

Tourist from out of town love boots. Local shopping on S. Congress?

Not so much.

Amy's. Austins favorite ice cream shop. By far. Crush-ins. Yes.

now closed for a break...

But really!!! Could you imagine a barber shop in Austin, Texas that is  NOT 

air conditioned? Could you?

I sampled the rosé and the Tempranillo and bought one of each. 

Not too sweet. Nicely light. Sampling in front of the Tiny Grocer.

no restaurant service. These are prices to get stuff in a styrofoam container and take home with you. Pretty reasonable. And just about any BBQ in central Texas is better than the best BBQ 

anywhere else. I laugh when people from states like Tennessee talk about their BBQ....

we generally just call that "sweetened meat." 

Hair salon signage. Love the marketing angle.

Nice day on the street. I hope you had a chance to get out, breathe deep and use your cameras.

All good. 

 

Packing now for a wide-ranging photo shoot on Wednesday and Thursday. MF or FF? Why not both?

Aerial Ballet.

I have to miss swim practice on Wednesday and Thursday of next week ---- but I think it's going to be worth it. We're doing a job for my favorite Austin ad agency and it feels like it's going to be both right up my alley and a hell of a lot of fun. I'll be shooting behind the scenes images of a cooking contest/show, following around in the footsteps of a big, friendly video crew, making images that someone else has spent hours painstakingly lighting and setting up. There will be food. And it's all indoors so --- comfort galore. We'll also be making still images for advertising.

I need to bring a plain background because I'll also be making fun portraits of the "celebrity" chefs, the judges, and the various gathered food luminaries. A second photographer, working for the client, will make the food "hero" shots and I'll grab looser versions after she's got the winners done perfect. 

A third "content creator" will be there to make impromptu images for social media. It's a big circus and what kid doesn't like a big circus? No elephants at this one...

I get to work side by side with a good video director. And an equally good crew. I'll be supported by agency people I've worked with on many jobs. And I'm pretty much going to be self-directed, as long as a I cover the requests on a short and vague shot list. 

So, what do I pack? I need to set up a small studio-esque area with a white background and couple of lights to make various portraits. They want consistency between the images, technically, so that's easier on me. Light once and shoot often. For the portraits I'll light with two Godox AD200 Pro flashes. One in a 45 inch umbrella and one in a 60 inch umbrella. We'll be dropping out the background so as long as there are no hard shadows we'll be in good shape. 

That station (the portraits) will get the new Fuji 50Sii and the 35-70mm lens as its camera. I'll comp nice and loose, anticipating a nearly square vertical shot that can be cropped in a number of ways. All good there. Something I've done a million times. 

The bulk of the shoot is behind the scenes and still photography b-roll stuff. That's the area that works best for the full frame cameras. I'll bring along a Leica SL2 with the 24-90mm zoom lens and a couple of Leica SLs with fun prime lenses as accent content makers and back-ups. I might even toss the Q2 in the bag just for grins. They all take the same batteries so.... it's an easy choice. The fact that everything will be lit for TV gives me a lot of flexibility as well. 

The shooting days are predicated on video shoot schedules so the days are long. Longer than I've done in the past couple of years. Our call times are 7:45 in the mornings and our wrap and go home times are 7 p.m. Two days like that and I'll definitely need an early Thursday bedtime and a nice, long swim on Friday.

Now charging batteries for all the Leica cameras. Kind of a mindless, fun inventory. 

So...how did last week's shoot turn out?

© 2023 Greg Barton. 

If you read last week's post about the food shoot on location then you'll remember that I was shooting "designed" food for a food bank. I worked hand in hand with my favorite creative director and a really smart, fun art director who came to the shoot on his Ducati motorcycle... We organized donated fruits and vegetables into groupings in industrial shelves and photographed them with the Fuji camera and the 35-70mm zoom lens. 

Here is the end result. A truck/trailer wrap on three sides with food, food, food. The back of the truck has logos and sponsor "thanks." 

It was a fun project with a tight turnaround for the agency people. How did I do? Well enough to get invited back for next week's shoot. And, yeah, with those big pixel, big files you can walk right up to the hugely bigger than life size images and see near endless details. That's how a shoot is supposed to go. Nice and fun and effective.

A short brag note: When I write about contemporary commercial photography it's never from the comfort and isolation of a padded easy chair, larded with a bunch of conjecture. Or other people's anecdotal stories.  I write about first hand experiences working with national award winning creative teams from large, successful ad agencies, and their clients. 

When I write about photographic gear; cameras, lights, lenses, I write about gear that I buy, that I use in the real world and on real paying jobs. And, if I write about it chances are 99% that I've been using it on projects across various types of clients and projects. Not conjecture. Not a recitation of a press release. And not from a day's dalliance making cat whisker photographs. Just sayin....

Don't know if that makes a difference to you but it's important for me.

 

Resting on the tattered laurels of bad decisions or continuing to move forward with every breath?

 Eating Ramen in Montreal. Planning a revisit.

Everyone makes a bad decision or two while living life. Some people seem to learn and move on, trying to bring the lessons from their follies into play to prevent future failures of judgement. Others seem to wallow in the past like pigs rolling in the mud. "I should have done this." "I should have done that." "I was in the right place at the right time and still fucked up my life." There is a litany of regrets from some people that make them hard to stomach. And so much of their "story" seems tied to things that happened or didn't happen twenty, thirty or forty years ago.

In some regards I feel blessed to have been equipped with an optimistic memory. Bad stuff that happened, or faux pas I made, don't linger in the data base of my brain. I seem to remember all the great stuff and very little of the trial and turmoil. As a result, when I hit a roadblock or art block, my first impulse isn't to play the victim or project self-pity but to plan for the future. For a new way of looking at the life I've been blessed with and to try and figure out how to leverage the power of all the things my partner and I have gotten right along the way. 

After writing five books for Amherst Media, with a modicum of success, I was approached by three other publishers who offered book contracts. One, Cengage, was willing to publish just about anything I wanted to write about ---- as long as photography of some sort was a central theme. I turned these offers down with absolutely no regrets because I had moved on to stuff that was more fun, more important and more satisfying. Raising a really bright child. Spending time with the most wonderful and beautiful woman I have ever met in my entire life. Swimming with great happiness with a group of dedicated and like-minded swimmers. Learning more about film-making. Running several profitable businesses. Having a blast with my cameras and my friends, and so much more. 

I turned down a tenure track position at a university. Bad decision?  No. Over time I had infinitely more photographic adventures than I ever would have had access to while teaching. I also made oodles more money than I would have made teaching classes four days a week. With office hours on the fifth day... And I got to meet people who were changing the worlds of commerce and technology, first hand. A front row, mid-court seat. I got to meet world leaders....and photograph them. Even better, I got to meet beautiful friends and photograph them as well.

I took care of both my parents in their decline and their passings after they lived long and happy lives packed with adventures and surrounded by three kids and more grandchildren. Dealing with Dad's dementia and his late life care was hard. Really hard. But my memories of those years now are all about the good times we spent together; even in hospice. All the funny conversations we had. The endless Sunday lunches we shared. Smuggling his favorite candies (Hershey's Kisses) into his room at memory care. My sense of attachment when helping him walk along with a cane nearly to the end of his life was profound. I remember with a certain pride how I helped them both through their tough transitions. It makes me happy, not sad, to realize that I helped make their later lives easier, more secure, safer, less anxious. Less lonely. And these are happy thoughts. Not sad thoughts. No words left unsaid. No unresolved conflicts or bad emotions. Just love and acceptance.

B. is going through the same thing with her 90+ year old mom. Her mom is still ambulatory. Still cognizant and still enjoying life. B. is there, with her brother and sister, to provide a warm and happy social/family fabric for their mom. And to help with all things financial and legal. And I get a good measure of happiness making sure our own home is a happy and easy place to come back to and a sanctuary for B. in which to relax and recharge. Trying to take care of little details so she can concentrate on what is important to her.

These are all happy things. Life will always throw curve balls at all of us but we have the option, the choice, to be satisfied with the way we've acted and reacted and how we used the power to experience the tough stuff without letting it cover us with a blanket of regret. And we have the option to keep moving forward.

B. and I worked hard all through our 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and halfway through our 60s. What do we have to show for all that work? Lives well lived. An ever strengthening relationship. Adventures around the world. A near perfect child (oops! "young adult"). Financial security beyond anything we could have dreamed of. And none of it collided with or was irrevocably impacted by a singular bad decision. There was nothing we could not recover from, learn from and eventually prosper from. 

Everyone gets hit by a "foul ball" once in a while. The decision to wallow in the pain and ruminate about it for decades or to shake it off and move on to something much better is in everyone's power. 

I find that as people get older they either get happier and more satisfied with life or they become  bitter and regretful. But those two ways of looking at life rarely coexist in one person. There is a hard and discernible difference. 

The ramen on that cold, rainy day in November, up in Montreal, was delicious. Sharing it with B. made it even more so. The cold and the rain were delightful. It made the happy fireplace in our "Old Town" hotel feel so special. You could bitch about the weather if you wanted to.

But should you? What value would you derive?

I guess it's possible to have many regrets about a life in or adjacent to photography. It could sure be a bumpy ride. But focusing on the past is like holding a bag of disintegrating garbage over your own head all the time. There's no value in trying to figure out what "might" have happened if you'd gone down a different road. Without access to a time machine there is only one road. But you get to decide if it's a tree-lined boulevard decorated with gold pavers. You can concentrate on the beauty and potential or bitch about the pot holes you might find. It's really up to you. 

Throw out the garbage.

Philosophizing over. 

Multiple slices of happiness and satisfaction this morning. Already a great day! (Short lens eval. after some "gray space" about swimming...).

 

discipline and motivation. to feel fast and strong is empowering.

I'll get to the photographic subject matter in a second but first I just have to luxuriate in the memory of this morning's swim practice. We've had good luck, in spite of the heat, in getting the water temperatures a bit lower in the Western Hills Athletic Club pool over the last several weeks. From a high water temperature of 85° in the worst of the hot and humid days we've seen a pretty rapid decline into the upper 70s lately. 

I thought we'd hit the best we could hope for when I was in the pool on Tuesday morning. It was 79° which is close to perfect--- but today.... Today the chatter on the deck was all about the new, low pool temperature for this Summer. A perfect, competition-ready, 76-77° degrees. Just absolutely perfect. And we could feel the difference in our workout. It was like free money. Or the fountain of youth.

It's Thursday so coach Jenn delivered her usual I.M. (Individual Medley) practice with lots of sets of butterfly, backstroke and breaststroke. Not long yardage but yards with a bit more intensity. It was good. We all swam well. And the water continued to be amazing. Exhilarating.

I can't wait for tomorrow's swim adventure. And Saturday's. And Sunday's. It's almost as fun as buying new cameras...

But you probably didn't come here to read about swimming. I'm thinking we're still mostly focusing on photography. At least I am....

After swim practice today I headed back to the office with a sense of mission. I was scheduled to photograph a new hire for the radiology practice I've worked with for over 25 years. I have hundreds of folders and galleries of the practice staff on Smugmug.com, some going back to the film days, and I was looking forward to adding a new doctor to the collection this morning. 

I was anticipating this session in my studio because I was going to use a new lens for the first time for work. It's the Mitakon 135mm f2.5 lens that's made in a Fuji GFX mount. It's a long, heavy lens with not even the slightest nod toward automation. There are no electrical contacts between this lens and the camera. And, obviously, no auto focus. Just the good, old focus by hand that we all used to do so well....

I bought this lens specifically to do portraits in the studio. It's the equivalent of a 106mm lens on a full frame camera. And even though I had no real expectation that it would be sharp across the frame at f2.5 I knew I'd be using it most of the time at f5.6, or in that neighborhood. After all, most clients really do want both the eyes and the tip of the nose in focus on their portraits...

The Fuji GFX50Sii is very tolerant of older, non-system lenses. I used the combination mounted on a tripod and I took advantage of the image magnification feature of the camera to make sure I was sharply focusing on my subject's eyes. I also had focus peaking engaged so I could tell if we were moving around too much front to back and back to front. The exposure, with my LED lights in various modifiers, was aperture of 7.1, shutter speed of 1/60th of a second, and ISO 320. I shot Raw+Fine Jpegs mostly so the previews would be ample and detailed. All the better to fine focus with. 

My take on the lens is that it's nicely sharp in the center two thirds of the frame from f4.0 up the scale to at least f16. The only place where the lens falls short for me is that at a portrait focus distance (about 6 feet) and at f5.6+ there is corner vignetting that is small but visible. I left a bit of extra "air" around my subject just in case and used that extra compositional slop as crop space to cut out the vignette. The trash space was about 1/20th of the frame. Not a big deal if you know about it in advance. 

I know that the Fuji 110 f2.0 lens is supposed to be the flagship lens of the whole system and a heart throb portrait lens but for my use in studio this 135mm does a fine job. And that's how I'll end up using it. As a studio portrait lens. Is there a Fuji 110 in my future? Who knows?

I did have a back light on the set but saw no flaring. Again ---- it's a heavy lens and having an L bracket is a blessing for tripod mounting. 

The young doctor I photographed arrived right on time and I ushered him into a temporarily chilly studio. I'll turn the AC back up to 78° now that he's gone. But I had to give the guy a break since he had to wear a suit and tie... He was amiable and very happy to have nailed a great position with a really good practice here in the city where he grew up. And, in fact, the practice I do these images for has been named as one of the top ten employers in the city every year, for over a decade. So.....lucky him. 

When I do these portraits I try to sit down as soon as the subject exits and import them into the system. Mistakes seem to happen more often as time goes by... I import all, edit out the frames that don't make the grade and then do a quick, global tweak before exporting big Jpegs for the online gallery. I make the Jpegs "beefy" so I would be able to use them in a pinch if anything happened to the other two sets of back up images. 

Within an hour of our session the gallery has been sent to marketing and I get to move on with the rest of my day. 

So, my takeaway vis-a-vis the 135mm Mitakon is that you would never want to use a manual focus lens with a long focus throw like this for sports or action but for controlled work in the studio the lens is a good option. Super sharp eyelashes, if that's where you focused. And nice overall tonality. I'll probably spark up the final files with a bit of the ole clarity slider in post production but really, the images are sharp enough already. I sometimes just like a little extra sparkle. 

Happy subject. Happy client. Happy photographer. Happy, happy swimmer. Today, right now, this is how life is supposed to be!!!