Hats, Shoes, Mannequins, and miscellaneous other subject matter. From a perfect, bright, cool day in San Antonio.

I know why photographers make selfies in public restrooms.

Lots of mirror space and unbridled joy in finding a nice, clean

restroom in a moment of need... 

All above photos made with a Leica Q2 set to various focal lengths.

I went to San Antonio yesterday and I met Gabe while I was walking down Houston Street. Fellow photographer and photo community organizer.

 

Gabe. 

Camera: Q2

On Houston St.

It's been three and a half years since I walked through the downtown streets of San Antonio, Texas. Back in 2019 my father passed away there. I had been driving down from Austin a couple times a week for over a year to oversee his care, and to enjoy his company, and I guess it was my sadness at his passing that deterred me from coming back for anything other than funerals and holiday gatherings with family. As far as photography and San Antonio were concerned I'd hung up my cameras and closed the book. 

My brother turned 70 last month. He still lives in San Antonio. He asked me to come down and eat at our favorite Mexican food restaurant to celebrate his milestone birthday and to catch up. I couldn't pass it up. I hadn't seen my brother in over a year even though we live only an hour and a half from each other. I also grew up eating fun, delicious Tex-Mex meals at La Fonda restaurant and that was a strong lure. I decided to try some "shutter therapy" (credit to Robin Wong for that) and turn what might have been a quick jaunt down and back home into a daylong revisiting of San Antonio's vibrant downtown; along with a camera and a couple extra batteries. 

When my father passed away my wife and I spent about half a year coming down to San Antonio to clean out the house he and my mom lived in for forty years. My brother was anxious to be through with the process. We donated nearly everything in the house to various charities. In cleaning out one closet I came across my father's favorite coat. An old, classic London Fog trench coat. Kept in perfect condition. It was too big for me and my brother was adamant that he didn't need or want it. I guess I had too many memories and emotional attachments to let it go so I brought the coat back up to Austin and hung it in my closet. Never quite sure what to do with it. 

A couple of weeks ago, while we were arranging a time and day to meet for dinner in SA I mentioned the coat to my brother. He was surprised that I kept it. He had come to regret not accepting it when I first asked. He'd worked through whatever it was that moved him to pass it by the first time. Now he was happy to have it. Not that anyone living in the mild climate of San Antonio has any actual need for a trench coat.... Maybe he'll get a couple days use out of it each year. 

I brought it down for him yesterday and he was quite pleased. Delivering the coat reinforced my "need" to come to town. As did a small packet of photographs I'd also uncovered, made by my parents, from my brother's very early childhood. Black and white on deckle edged photo paper. Quite charming. 

I prefer to enjoy family in small doses. I'm not one to sit around and reminisce. We agreed to meet at 6 p.m. at the restaurant but I came into town around 11 in the morning. I wanted to spend the majority of my time in San Antonio in the downtown area and I wanted the solitude of walking by myself, kept company by a small camera in my hands. 

After a lot of thought I settled on bringing the Leica Q2. It's a perfect camera for those days and situations on which you have no preconceived idea of what you want to photograph. No established target for your photographic energy. Just a curiosity overlayed with sentimental memories of walks through the same streets years and decades earlier. 

I always try to park on Avenue B, just northeast of the Alamo. Down the street from the old Emily Morgan Hotel, now posing as a Hilton Garden Inn property, just across the street from San Antonio's most visited landmark...

Since I generally drink a cup of coffee on my road trip to San Antonio my first stop is a quick duck into the public restrooms at the Alamo to pee. I have no other real interest, photographic or otherwise, in the Alamo so I quickly head over to Commerce St. and head west towards El Mercado; the big market at the west end of the street, just before the overpass for highway I-10. 

All along Commerce St. are classic and (by American standards) ancient buildings that have been repurposed, generation by generation, into restaurants, bars, gift shops and other attractions for the flow of tourists who come to "the Alamo city." The buildings are wonderful to look at because most of them have good "bones" and the designs and architecture are much different than Austin. Mostly because Austin was for the longest time a much smaller town and had much less money to spend on magnificent buildings. 

I mostly use the camera with the lens set at its usual 28mm focal length. But with 47 megapixels at my disposal I have no hesitation to using the crop mode to bring up frame lines for 35mm and 50mm. I'm still learning to trust the 7.5 megapixel, 75mm crop but I bet I'll get there... On a bright, sunny day I set the WB to the "sunny" icon (daylight) and use the camera with the Jpeg format. No need for raw files if there's no color to correct or underexposures to fret about...

I spent some time walking around the market, looking at all the restaurants and maybe five or six hundred gift shops crammed into several vast interior spaces. El Mercado has long since shed its original reason to exist. It as once a hub for farmers, ranchers and other food producers to meet and do commerce with the restaurant food buyers and even the general, fresh food buying public. But that use vanished decades ago, replaced mostly with vendors selling bright colored and highly decorated cowboy hats, hand crafts from Mexico, candies and souvenirs. The weekend scene is lively because bands play in the open spaces of the sprawling market walkways and food vendors serve up Mexican favorites all day long. In all but the worst weather weekends are a long, lively party of dancing, drinking and casual shopping. Need an authentic pancho? They'll have it in ever color scheme you can imagine. And you can shop with a margarita in hand. 

I'm rusty when it comes to photographing San Antonio natives. Tourists are easy. Like shooting fish in a barrel. But I've lived in Austin for too long. Surrounded by a different culture and a different demographic. It's hard to not feel that I'm an outsider now in what was once my home town. But I'm guessing that if my visits become more frequent I'll break down some of the psychological barriers that make me feel I'm taking advantage of people by photographing them. Isn't that interesting?

I was walking back east from the market and marveling at all the small shops and bars along the way that are closing down. Ostensibly making way for another wave of big, anonymous office and hotel building construction. I stopped by a restaurant called The Royal Blue Grocery for a long overdue lunch that consisted of a slice of pizza and a small bottle of Pellegrino.

In the next block I ran into Gabe. The person in the photos above. He was waiting in front of an office building. He is a photographer and had organized a Sunday afternoon meet-up for fellow photographers, complete with a demonstration of studio lighting by a photographer that Gabe described as one of the top commercial photographers in San Antonio. I guess he was waiting to greet stragglers. He stopped me to ask about my camera. I assume he thought I was coming to the lecture and when I passed by he must have figured I was lost and so made contact. 

We chatted for a bit and he described all the things their photo society is working on. Kind of a casual support group for people who are, like ourselves, addicted to the craft. It was nice to hear. We exchanged contact info and, at the last moment I asked him if it would be okay to make a portrait of him right there. He readily agreed. It was a nice moment for me. I'd been looking at the work of Paul Reid and while I don't want to copy Paul I do now find making portraits with a wide angle lens, with the aperture wide open, to be intriguing. In some ways revelatory for me. I've spent so long working at the longer end of the focal length spectrum. 

At a different area in San Antonio, a new shopping and restaurant area centered around a restoration of an historic and famous Texas brewery, I also met a second young photographer. It was just the kind of comfortable day when people were out to rediscover the basic joy of walking around with a camera and no set schedule. No responsibilities and no agenda. Just walking for pleasure. Photographing out of curiosity and joy. Ending the day with a plate of glorious enchiladas and tacos and then driving back to the land of yoga, IPOs, Porsches and emerald green lawns. San Antonio is more interesting...

What did you do over the weekend? I hope there was a camera involved. ...

I've been shooting more in black and white. Sometimes I think wide angle views benefit the most from that format.

 

A while back I bought a cheap, TTArtisan 21mm f1.5 lens for the L mount systems. I used it a couple of times but I thought, at the time, that I just didn't see well with very wide angle lenses. I usually have a wide angle "limiter" in my brain that cuts off anything wider than 28mm. But last month I came across the lens again at the back of a drawer and thought that I should either give it another try or move it out and along to someone who might appreciate it more. What a difference a sunny day can make...

I used the lens in conjunction with a Leica SL2 camera and I could see that setting the camera to "monochrome" did more than just desaturate the colors. Leica seems to have created an invisible (as in: not in the menu) preset for monochrome Jpegs that takes into consideration the way black and white film works. Panchromatic black and white film. I also noted that they seem to have tweaked the way the camera responds to different colors. Almost as if when using it this way you are getting the result of a yellow filter or maybe even a weak orange filter. Skies get dramatically darker and contrasts seem to pop. 

My earlier dismissal of the lens was premature. I paid less than $300 for the lens, new, and when I looked carefully at these more recent results I was much more impressed than I was with my first outings --- which were on cloudy, winter days. The lens has some geometric distortion. Yes. And it has some smearing of details in the corners. Sure does. But it delivers a good level of sharpness in the center of the frame and when shooting in black and white I love the way the lens, at least in the center 2/3rds of the frame, renders things like clouds and hard lines of buildings. 

Since I'm not a power user of wide angles, and since I don't attract clients who would be best served by ultra-wide angle photographs I find this lens is more than adequate for my casual/artsy use. But, of course, when I get good stuff from a focal length like this one my thoughts immediately go to how much better the results might be if I invested in something like a Carl Zeiss 21mm f4.5 ZM. A much smaller and much slower lens. And maybe a much better corrected lens. Chances are I'll stumble across one when I least expect it and I'll mistakenly take its abrupt appearance as a sign from the photo gods that I should snap it up and try it out. Bad wiring, I suspect. 

Last week it was freezing and today we're walking around in shorts and t-shirts. Clear skies and 70°. Nice. I was reading a book last night called, "Letting Go of the Camera" by Brookes Jensen...

the secret night life of mannequins.

In the book of essays, mostly done for "Lens Work" (a periodical about fine art photography) Jensen makes several points which closely align with what I've written here. When it comes to making good photographs we both believe that engaging with photography on a daily basis is important. Vital perhaps. The more you copy yourself the more you fine tune your own vision. And the more you practice the more fluid and competent you become. But what does that really mean? Do you really need to be out roaming around with your camera in hand every single day?

No. You just need to be engaged with your photography practice every single day. There are days when I take no photographs at all. But on those days I still carry a camera with me everywhere I go. Not only for "just in case images" but also because having it on my shoulder or in my hand normalizes having the camera always with me. It doesn't feel awkward of out of place. Always there for an unexpected gift from the muses or the gods of photography. In a way I stop thinking about it. In the same way that I don't dwell on which socks or which pants I'm wearing. As long as I am wearing pants....

Some days I don't go out walking with a camera but instead stay in the office post processing images I've shot the day before or the day before that. I don't subscribe to the practice of photographing for days and days until I fill up a memory card and then going through the images at a much later date; in a large batch. I want to make the post processing as tightly connected to the actual photography as possible so I have a keen memory of what the conditions were like when I was making the images. I want to remember how it felt to line up the composition. I want to remember what kinds of corrections I made to the camera's suggested exposure and color balance. The near contemporaneous feedback loop reinforces the learning; the distillation process. When too much time goes by your motivation for making the shots gets hazier; more opaque. You forget the choices you  made and why you made them.

But on days when I am in the office, at my desk, looking at images, seeing just how far I can push the ISO on a ten year old digital camera before the files start to fall apart, I still have a camera on the desk in front of me --- or just by my side. Almost as if it's engaged in the process but mostly so I can reference in my mind how I was holding the camera while shooting and how I might improve my technique.

All of the images here are from and evening walk done two days ago. I'd just finished up a portrait session in the studio and said "goodbye" to the client. I noticed it was five o'clock and I wanted to go for a walk to make some evening/twilight shots with one of the Leica M (240) cameras. I'd read often lately about how "weak" that camera model is with high ISOs and dark environments. "Too noisy!" seemed to be the consensus. But I'm thickheaded and obdurate and I like to see things for myself. Everyone seems to have different tolerances for things like noise and, even more importantly, the post production environment has also changed radically. Noise reduction with A.I. is nearly unimaginably good. So I wanted to see for myself if ISO 3200 could look good. How about ISO 6400? And, like a tolerance for heat or loud noise, everyone's tolerance for visual noise artifacts and patterns in pictures is equally individual. I know how much I want to tolerate and I know it's different than even my peers whose judgements I respect. 

I also want to know how the files look because I want to make sure that when I work for clients the camera and post production combined are adequate to satisfy even people who are more sensitive than I am about noise. It's part of the ongoing testing we should all do if our aim is to satisfy a paying client.

When I really want to see what a camera like the M Leica can do I pair it with a very high performance lens. Right now I'm testing the SL and SL2 noise performance in conjunction with Lightroom's "Denoise" control in the develop module. I'm using what I believe is my highest performance lens for that system (that I own....) and that's the new (to me) Carl Zeiss Milvus 50mm lens. But on the M cameras the lens of choice for me is the Voigtlander 50mm APO Lanthar f2.0. So that's the lens I chose for this foray. 

When I went out to walk and see what the M camera, lens and Lightroom can do I made judgements about the way I habitually work with this camera. Neither camera nor lens has image stabilization. So I normally shoot the camera with a 50mm lens at a shutter speed of 1/125th of a second or above. On this particular evening I was trying to stick to 1/250th of second for as long as I could, riding the ISO dial up as the light dropped. In this way I more or less eliminated the effects of camera shake in my post shooting evaluations of the resulting images. Too easy for the mind to conflate a technical shortcoming for a camera shortcoming so why not eliminate some variables.

Some people have trouble with rangefinder focusing. On this subject one thing I can say that might help is to make sure your rangefinder windows (two on the front) are very clean and don't "feature" fingerprints on the glass. Also make sure your viewfinder window on the rear of the camera is equally clean. Adding "organic soft focus filters" via finger prints or nose grease to the glass is a quick way to screw up your ability to find good focus. Clean is good. 

I practiced rangefinder focusing with various Leica M film cameras for nearly a decade before switching to digital cameras. The techniques came back pretty quickly when I started shooting with the M cameras again. And sparkling, clean glass is a benefit I well remember from the film days. 

What I found when I opened up all the files today is that I can still hand hold a camera from 1/60th of a second upward fairly steadily if it's got a 50mm lens (or wider) on the front. I learned that the Leica M sensor from 2012 has shadow noise once you crest 1600 on the ISO setting. But I also learned with this morning's experiments in post processing that Lightroom's Denoise has the superpower to clean up the noise without any deleterious effects on sharpness or detail. Score!!! That makes ten+ year old Leica rangefinder cameras still eminently usable right now, in 2024. 

While shooting I appreciated that the optical viewfinder seems superior in low light to EVFs because it doesn't slow down (refresh rate with slower shutter speeds) or get noisy or jumpy. It's as bright and clear as your vision allows. I learned once again how much I like bright line finders that allow me to see what is coming into the frame but not quite there yet. I also like how the frame, with information outside the frame, helps me to fine tune composition. 

There is a danger in reading information about cameras from people who very rarely actually practice it in real life, and with a collection of modern cameras. You end up getting mostly information the writer gleaned from whenever his formative years with a camera happened. If that was in the film days and the writer was mostly a 35mm film shooter you'll be getting information that's a bit stale and not as relevant to modern cameras and modern shooting techniques as you might want. We don't have to fill the frame to avoid cropping (a la the slide film days). With 50 or 60 megapixels, or even 24, you can certainly crop with near reckless abandon.

When I read something written about a camera I want to know if the writer is still an active photographer. Does he or she get out and use cameras on a regular basis? Every day? Every week? Once a month? What are his or her priorities. Are they tied to a "real" job or do they have time to experiment with their cameras at all hours of the day and in all kinds of weather? Have they shot ten thousand frames with the camera they are writing about or are they just giving you their impression after the first hundred or so frames? 

So much of what we learned while shooting films is like ancient lore. Passed down from photo generation to photo generation and venerated by some even as it becomes increasingly obsolete. When I think about this I think about car tinkerers who've never learned how to work on fuel injection systems but who can talk to you about carburetors for hours and hours. Folks who imagine that purists only drive with manual transmissions. Computer veterans who wish we still used punch cards. Swimmers who think the waterline should hit you mid-forehead while swimming freestyle. Doctors who still think stomach ulcers are caused by stress and cured by bland diets. 

When I write about cameras here it's because I've found out interesting things about them while using them nearly every day. Looking back at one week in 2023 I note that I shot 2,300 images with a Leica M in Montreal. Another 970 images during the same week with a Leica Q. You learn a great deal more when you use a camera for hours and hours a day, for days at a time. And you learn even more when you sit down and post process your take all the while experimenting with the new features and controls that your software programs deliver to you. 

Brookes Jensen has some interesting ideas that stand the test of time. He believes in self assigning projects. He means that you might decide on a subject matter that you really love and you plan a project around that. He also believes in setting finite goals. He would suggest that you attempt (and succeed) in setting your project goal to make 100 portfolio prints of your chosen subject. Not work prints but finished prints you'd be proud to show off. He wrote about that over 20 years ago and I'd modernize it a bit by saying 100 perfect portfolio images that you could place in an online gallery and share with friends and colleagues. 

Either way projects represent a big investment in time and a requirement to knuckle down and do the work. But at every step of the way he suggests you will learn new and valuable skills and new ways of looking at the work you want to make in the future. And that's very valuable.

I have a friend who got an English B.A. from a very prestigious school. He's a writer for a large corporation. He's always wanted to write a book. His whole sense of self as a writer revolves around the idea that he will one day write a book. He stops and starts on book projects but never completes them. 

Finally, after I wrote five books in a row, over the course of two years,  for Amherst Media, and then a 465 page novel, he asked me how. "How do you get through the process of writing a book?" It's all very simple. You get assigned or assign yourself to write a book. You make an outline. Then you work relentlessly on the damn book until you finish it. No excuses. Doesn't matter if it's great or not as long as you finish it. Once you finish it you can make it better. You can edit. You can hire an editor. You can revise to your heart's content. But to my mind it's the resolute act of just finishing one that makes everything work. Once you've done your first book the second is easier and the third is easier still. It's like a photo project. The big thing is to set a goal and follow through until you've completed the goal. 100 prints? Cool. And once you've gotten to those 100 great prints you can take a deep breath and see if there are better images out there that you can also include or swap in. But it's meeting the initial goal that's the most important step. 

Brookes Jensen says that setting the goal and achieving it opens up so many more opportunities. And he's not talking about doing this for professionals. He's talking about hobbyists doing projects and setting goals. It gives your work the structure you might find most helpful.

For now my immediate goal is to explore the limits of my rangefinder cameras. My overriding goal is to shoot enough beautiful portraits to fill a book. And then to write the book. I think I can figure that out.

The M Leica is a fun camera. It's not the all purpose camera that most people might look for but as an alternative to a work camera it is a heck of a lot of fun. 

Question? How do you write a blog everyday? Um. Sit down and write your blog... That was easy.

exactly as I saw the scene.