Goodbye 2023. The year in review.

 

2023 was a crappy year for a lot of the world. Wars, poverty, economic downturns, rampant inflation and climate issues galore. But for those lucky enough to dodge most of the sad and desperate things happening in the world many days worked out well. Some were great, and a few were superb. I count myself as one of the lucky ones -- to be alive in this time, in the this location, in my local economy. 

This was the year I came to grips with the idea of slowing down the business or retiring altogether. In all, I did sixteen days of work out of 365 days in the year. That's not much of a workload. With this kind of trajectory I'll probably slim down the commercial engagements to six or maybe eight in 2024. Actually one a month sounds just right.

I dreaded turning down work at first but after I did so, in most cases, I felt a sense of relief. Of being unburdened.  A sense of having more finite control over my own time. With the exception of two days no other obligations to any client intruded or interfered with my daily morning swim workouts. That's an exceptional achievement for the year.

Of course declining work means that one source of fee income that I've gotten used to over the past 40 years became pretty much non-existent. You have to get used to changing your financial perspective if you are going to turn down paying work. You take money from different pots instead of living via business cash flow. It's a psychological reset but you get used to it over time. Repetition goes a long way toward instilling comfort. And, I've had good mentors show me the way to do good financial "wing walking". The secret is to not let go of one strut until you have a good grip on the next one. 

One would think that after jettisoning a previous source of income that my passion for buying new cameras and lenses would have abated; or at least slowed down. But that wasn't the reality of 2023 for me. If anything I stayed at par for fun expenses. I dipped a toe into M mount cameras and lenses and then, after some testing and shooting, I dove in with abandon. In fact, my last purchase of the year was another Leica M 240, acquired just last week. The M mount stuff joins the Fuji GFX 50Sii stuff as the "big" acquisitions of the year. 

The end result? The new gear is fun and interesting. I used the GFX for two big assignments so I made some money with that system. The M cameras, not so much. But they were really fun to photograph with. In fact, I took only an M240 with four M mount lenses, and a Leica Q2 with me on a seven day solo photographic vacation in Montreal. One of my favorite cities in North America. The combination of the M camera and the Q camera was great and helped me be productive while not dragging around huge camera bags full of stuff. I loved the vacation. More like that....

Everyone in my nuclear family weathered the year with very few bumps in the road. No health scares, no job loses and no big personal losses to speak of. 

One thing I took up late this year is "camera scanning" of last century black and white and color film negatives. Being able to access those old negatives is like having access to a time machine. Only with new PhotoShop features and camera capabilities you can pull so much more out of the film. I'm actually looking forward to cold and rainy days so I have a good excuse to stay in the office and go fishing for images I overlooked before. This will, of course, necessitate the purchase of ever more hard drives for storage...

Looking forward.

I'm committed to blogging for at least another year. Unless my readers get all judgmental about me being judgmental and start opening their comments with the phrase: "you should....." There are so few blogs left that actually discuss photography without heavy doses of malaise and moroseness that I sometimes find I write just so I'll have something to read later....

With all these wonderful M series Leicas and lenses at hand I'm ramping up travel. I don't want to go anywhere during high travel seasons when all the fun venues are crowded to the max ---- and hotels and plane fares are exorbitant --- since I have the flexibility to travel in the off seasons. And I'll be taking complete advantage of that. 

Ben had a great time in Japan so that's got to be my next adventure. Dates pending. He's a great source of logistical info. Istanbul is also near the top of my travel radar. I was in Istanbul many years ago and I'm curious to see how much has changed and how much stayed the same. 

2024 is an election year so I'll make sure to avoid all exposure to Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and most of Instagram. Spam filters on high!!!  I'll donate as much $$$ as we can to our candidates and hope for the best. But I'm not willing to carry around any of the rancor that so many seem to embrace. Almost like a hobby. And I'll work at keeping politics off the blog. If you come here to drop political comments into the mix they will most likely be expunged ---- even if I agree with your position 100%. This blog is supposed to be about a life in photography. Not the collapse of modern civilization...

I'll probably get a new phone this year and it will most certainly be an Apple iPhone. I'll piss off my video production friends by making wonderful videos on it. Ignoring their investments in "state of the art" video gear. I might even reawaken my YouTube channel which currently has no videos and 25 followers. But it's so obvious that video is the future of communications. Maybe not the future of art but yes, the future of advertising and communications. You know it is --- even if you lie about it and claim never to have watched a tutorial or review on YouTube. Or watched a movie...

2024 seems like a good year to maintain a commitment to staying in good shape. After all, if you are going to travel you may as well be comfortable walking ten or fifteen miles a day in order to find the photographs (and experiences) you want on your journeys. No "couch potato" travel here. No shooting photos through the green tinted windows of a tour bus. No skipping a great view because it's off the beaten path. No heading to the bar instead of moving forward. 

As usual, my commitment to myself is to make it to five x one hour swim practices per week. To pay attention to the swim advice and coaching of my highly professional and insanely good swim coaches while having fun and being mostly out of breath the whole time. Let's get those exercise heart rates up to 160 and move some blood through the systems. Few interesting things happen while napping.

Will also continue some cross training by doing resistance exercise at the gym two or three days a week as well as walking three or four miles per day. I knew the spare time freed up by turning down work would be good for something....

And...I will continue to eat whatever I want and enjoy every freaking bite. 

I have no advice for anyone else. And most of my audience believes so strongly that they are imbued with incredible amounts of knowledge already and so wouldn't listen if I did give out advice. That's why we make this blog about the day to day life of an average person engaged in photography and not an advice column. Use whatever camera you want. I don't care. It doesn't matter. As long as we're still having fun. 

Photography has changed profoundly. I don't have all the answers to any part of it. There is no "right" way to do it. There are few to no rules. The next big thing is the next big thing and I have no clue what it will be or where it's coming from. Mining the past is nostalgia. It's addictive but there's so much left to do in the future. Let's go.

A Recycled post from 2012. I liked the photo. And I liked being reminded that it was made with a Leica SL2. Not the digital version... the film version.

 

Kissing the last days of Summer goodbye with a yellow flowered dress and a floppy straw hat.

We spent a few days up around
Fredericksburg, Tx. and around Enchanted Rock shooting a fashion 

spread for a magazine. We were taking a short break on an ancient front

 porch attached to a grand, old, Texas wooden ranch house. I looked

 over and saw my model's look of quiet (tired) repose and I pulled up

 my camera in order to catch not just her youthful beauty but also the

 warm and unhurried feel of the day. It was near the end of September

 and still in the mid 90's. We were all warm but not glistening. I was

 drawn to the line of the young woman's jaw, the tranquility of her

 expression and the little wisp of dark hair sweeping down in front of

 her ear under her light colored straw hat.
Not lighting trickery here. Just the open shade. No post production

 elbow grease here just a curve adjustment in the scanning and a tiny bit

 of sharpening in Snapseed. No Promethean camera here, just an older

 Leica SL2 and an older, used 90mm Summicron. 

Fuji ISO 100 slide film.

Just dropped by to see if the VSL world HQ is locked up tight and bolstered with sandbags at every window. New Years Eve in Texas can get... rambunctious.

 All good here. Nothing to see until the 31st. But mostly from January first onward. Have fun out there. Don't get hurt, or arrested. Just remember what my favorite CEO's body guard used to say to his protectee when we traveled for work:

"Sir. Please be in your suite by 10 pm. Nothing good ever happens after ten."

I spent part of the holiday learning how to scan film with a camera and how to process the files from the scans. Fun.

Note. Not back from vacation. This post was originally published on the 3rd of Dec. but somehow got lost. I'm reposting it... See you in the new year.

When I sat down to distill my archive of photographs into a manageable collection it dawned on me that in addition to hundreds and hundreds of thousands of digital files I also have tens of thousands of various film frames. In fact, the first 25 years of my tenure as a photographer were, of course, all done on film. And a large amount of the work was done on black and white film. In the early days of PhotoShop and digital post processing I worked with a Nikon CoolScan 4000 to scan the 35mm images I wanted to play with and depended on a series of ever improved flatbed scanners to create files from medium format and 4x5 inch pieces of film. Neither of these methods was particularly efficient of fun so after a while I just gave up and took the occasional handful of negatives and/or slides over to Holland Photo and had them scan the film on one of their Noritsu machines. Again, since I couldn't put my hands on that process I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the results. I had become far too conditioned to spend time doing my own tweaks and improvements during the course of the process. How could I not, having spent two decades hunkered down in my commercial darkroom?

With an ongoing wind down of commercial work since the pandemic I once again turned my attention to the idea of getting my favorite images scanned and out into the wild. Further motivated by the high resolution cameras that have come onto the market. I recently took a big plunge into researching how other people handled their "camera scans." (camera scans is my reference to placing a piece of film into a film holder, putting that on a very good light source and then photographing that frame with a high resolution camera body and a macro lens. After some DIY trial and error I broke down and ordered a Negative Film Supply negative holder and one of their high CRI/TLCI LED light sources. Those, along with a sturdy copy stand are the bedrock of my new scanning methodology. And I find it all works quite well. 

There is one caveat that must be voiced. You have to clean the dust off your negatives/slides before you scan them because every little spot and speck shows up. The worst is scanning black and  white negatives because there is nowhere for the dust spots to hide. Clean film is your friend. Clean film is your time saver. 

It's interested to note that everyone starts out their film scanning/camera scanning with the presumption that the highest megapixel camera is the best route to success. Of course, this all depends on your final target. But I have found that 24 megapixels digital cameras that have a good "multi-shot" high resolution mode are very good choices. Especially if that's what you have in house and don't feel like splashing out a lot more cash for what is really, mathematically, a relatively small amount of improvement. 

The lead photo of this post (above) was shot originally on Agfapan 25 medium format film. I think I did a good job processing it (Rodinal 1:50) and washing it because it's clean and stain free after 40 years of storage. I camera scanned this using a Panasonic S5, the Sigma 70mm f2.8 Art Series Macro lens and the above mentioned Negative Film Supply gear. I brought the raw file into Photoshop and inverted it (adjustments menu) and then worked on it by adding some contrast and some basic tweaks. It took about five minutes for me to get it just right. Much less time than my old flatbed scanner took to do a worse job....

I use the camera in the Aperture preferred mode. I set the aperture to between f8 and f11. ISO is set at 100. I use a blower brush on the front and back of the negative to get off as much dust as possible. I use a daylight WB. The LED is bright enough to give me a shutter speed of around 1/160th of a second. I've been using the camera set to multi-shot, high res and raw. So far it's been a good way to work. 

Of course I am manually focusing since we're down at near life-size. I have to say that some modern conveniences such as focus peaking are most welcome. It makes getting focus much easier. 

Since I already owned the cameras, the lens and the copy stand I've only had to come out of pocket for about $300 worth of additional gear. But, unlike cameras the film holder and light source don't become obsolete and are not "objects of desire" so it's all pretty much a one time expenditure which, I hope, will provide years of entertainment and material. 

A camera scan from a medium format color negative of Lou. Original photo 

done with a Hasselblad 500 CM + a 180mm CZ lens. The lens has the worst 

bokeh of any lens I have ever used and I blurred out the background a bit so

you would not have to see the harsh highlights caused by a five bladed aperture/shutter. 

The film was Agfa Portrait which was a lower saturation negative film.

From the Spanish Steps. Photographed with a Mamiya 6 camera and a 150mm lens.

Exposure info not recorded but the edge print of the film tells me that it was

captured on Tri-X film (TXP-6049). 

this was originally photographed on a rare film stock. It was Agfa Scala 200, a black and white positive transparency film. It was quite contrasty and sometime rendered reds too strongly. But it's a fun look and even more fun to scan. 

This image started life on Verichrome Pan film.

A nice and long toned black and white negative film; kind of an opposite of

the very contrasty Plus-X that was also popular at the time.

shot on a Hasselblad; I just check and found the little "Vs" in the film edge.

I'm breaking the scanning into projects. First up are my favorite old black and white negatives from multiple trips to Rome. Then I plan to dig in and scan tons of portraits --- family and friends; interesting other people. It's an interesting rabbit hole. Already having much more fun than I thought I would. 

Questions? Sure. 

For the aggressively pendantic. I'm currently calling the conversion of analog film to digital files "scanning." Call it whatever the heck you want. But it's not a straight copy shot anymore. That train has sailed....

This image was "copied" directly from four dimensional "real life" directly through the camera sensor and onto a solid state memory card. It required additional steps for me to be able to post it here. 

Give me a break.

Film scan from Agfapan 25 MF negative. ISO 25.

 

Bye for now. Taking the rest of the year off for the holidays. Enjoy the year end festivities.

Wreath on a house in Iceland.

 A second M 240 comes in for a soft landing.

Coffee at Mañana to reset the menus.

Or...what I'm doing on my December vacation.

End of day coffee break.

 Coffee and quiet at Mañana Coffee.

Soup. Just Soup. Medium Format Color Transparency Film

 

No edge notches so it must have been taken with a Rollei 6008i camera and appropriate lens. For some reason I couldn't find the exif information for this one....

My one Christmas wish? Besides world peace? Besides eliminating hunger and disease? Oh that's easy. It would be for either Hasselblad or Fujifilm or some other bold camera company to come out with a digital medium format system built around a 6 x 6 cm sensor. Full frame for medium format. The perfect aspect ratio. At this point I'm not sure I even care about the price. I guess I could always sell one of the cars and get a nice electric bike. But wouldn't it be great to