Warning: Some images may be considered NSFW in some midwestern US states and especially in deep south US states. No buildings or mannequins or other bloggers' feelings were harmed in the presentation of these random images from Eeyore's Birthday Party at Pease Park in Austin, Texas. Check back later for gear notes.

 

Added: Gear Notes. All images taken using a Leica M240 camera set to uncompressed DNG. Two lenses utilized. The Carl Zeiss 50mm f2.0 and the Voigtlander VM 75mm f1.9. Processed in Lightroom Classic. Minimal processing beyond exposure and contrast.

Eeyore's Birthday Party has evolved from a small gathering of English majors from UT to a counter culture gathering of pot heads and hippies to, finally, a family friendly, PG rated fund raiser for mainstream Austin non-profits. It's lost its cool edge but is now more accessible to more people and it maintains an Austin vibe. The pot smoke was more subdued this year. The public nudity much more restrained, the family friendly stuff made much more pervasive. Kind of kills the interest for some photographers but I'm a believer in inclusion so there is that. 

I walked through and ran into Jerry Sullivan who, until recently, was the owner and operator of Precision Camera. He was sporting an M series Leica and some fun lenses. He had, in tow, Pete Holland who founded Holland Photo Lab many years ago. He retired about ten years back and he was making fun images today with a Ricoh GR111x camera. I ran into my friend from lunch the day before and he was sporting a new camera which shall, for the immediate future, remain ambiguous. 

I walked down a mile from my car and carried with me a Leica M240 and a couple of lenses. It all worked well. 

Since it is my blog I put in photographs that I liked. When I came home and got cleaned up B. and I went to our favorite neighborhood restaurant. It's closing for good on Tuesday. Some investor from California is raising the rent on the space the restaurant has occupied for decades by an additional 300%. Haven't they heard that Austin is imploding? Don't they want to head back home and continue messing stuff up in their own back yard?

In other notes, Austin restaurant, Jeffrey's, sold a bottle of wine a couple of weeks ago for the princely sum of $60,000. The gratuity on the bottle service was a whopping $14,000. Apparently Austin isn't out of the running for the most Ostentatious City in the Country just yet....

I like big events in the park that DON'T have: VIP tents. VIP shuttles. VIP bars. VIP early entry, etc. Eeyore's raises money for non-profits. For charities. Nobody gets rich from Eeyore's. Looking at you, trough feeders at ACL and SXSW.....

Just normal, mostly well adjusted people, collectively enjoying an afternoon in a beautiful park. With tens of thousands of other like-minded people. Nice. No valet parking. No heliports. 

And kids. Lots and lots of kids. Always looking to the future. 

Hope you like the photos. 

Random Shots from Eeyore's Birthday Party 2024. Part One. Note: These contain no harmful mannequin photos or photos of skyscapers. I guess they are safe for the sensitive viewers.

 

I was all ready to take a couple of Leica SL cameras and a couple of Sigma lenses with me to Eeyore's Birthday Party at Pease Park in Austin, Texas when it dawned on me that the older, Leica M240 would offer me more friction of use which might result in more interesting images. Especially since the friction immerses me more in the process and the visualization of photographs. I ended up taking one M240 camera, a 50mm f2.0 Zeiss lens and a 75mm f1.9 Voitlander VM lens instead. The combo was slower to use and required that I pay more attention. And for that I am thankful. 

Loving the bucket hats that match the shirts. Well done gentlemen!!!

Of course, I was wearing green bucket hat which in some universe might 

have matched my olive green short pants...

Mom's gotta mom when kids take a spill. 

Loving this image of the young drummer giving a side eye to someone. 

Grateful to have been alert to the action. And the camera worked its own magic.

Bubble mania. 

What kind of shoes does a four time Olympic swimmer wear to Eeyore's?

These. The ones right above...

A bit cheeky. Yes?

A running take off of Sandy's Hamburger restaurant on Barton Springs Rd. 

Go there for the burgers but stay for the chocolate dipped, soft serve, ice cream cones. 

delicious and a core part of Austin...

Lenses that sometimes fly under the radar. And...Eeyore's Birthday Party.

 

I had lunch yesterday with an old friend. Well, he's not old, really but he's been a friend for a long time. Since we are both photographers we quickly moved the conversation away from politics, religion and whether or not skyscrapers were a valid photo target to less controversial and fraught subjects and settled in to discussing lenses. Yes, I know, if we were "real" artists we would have discussed some ingenious application of the color, French blue, into our work. Then we might have touched on something to do with combining our visions with discourse about hermeneutical comparisons of the seen and the unseen. But it's rare that burgers and fries engender such lofty discussions. We stuck to lenses. 

My friend is in the middle of expanding into a new camera system and asked my opinion, a few days earlier, about the Sigma i-Series lenses. He asked if I would bring a sample or two along with me to our scheduled lunch so he could get a handle on how they handle. A request I could easily handle...

I wanted to present a handful of lenses so I packed a small bag with the 24mm f3.5, the 35mm f2.0, the mystical and most often overlooked 45mm f2.8 and the small but powerful 90mm f2.8. I rarely hear about the 90mm f2.8 but it is one of my favorite lenses of all. It's small and light, optically very competitive and it's inexpensive. Especially among lenses in the Leica world.

The 90mm lens was fresh in my mind because it was the lens I used on my job the day before. I photographed two attorney in office environments and the 90mm focal length was perfect for the combination of good "drawing" for mid-torso portrait compositions --- meaning it didn't add foreshortening or too much obvious compression to the subject --- good optical performance when used with the SL2 (eye detect AF worked well with sharp irises and soft, diaphanous backgrounds) and quick focusing. In contrast to bigger lenses like the elephantine Leica 24/90mm or the Sigma 85mm f1.4 Art series lens the little 90mm makes working on a tripod casual fun. No drooping in a vertical orientation and no feeling of unbalance in any position. 

Many photographers overlook the 90mm f2.8 because they feel that they "need" the much faster aperture of the big, chubby, ungainly 85mm f1.4 lenses that everyone seems to offer. I guess f1.4 is nice to have if  you constantly shoot under profoundly dismal light but my decades of experience tell me that the times in which such a wide open aperture adds to a good portrait are minimal. Used at an 85mm's closest focusing distance with the aperture wide open is a novelty but eventually one gets bored by sharp irises and out of focus eyelashes and noses. Or sharp eyelashes and soft irises. In many past generation 85mm high speed lenses there was nearly always a trade off between speed and overall sharpness in photos. Yes, you could capture images at f1.4 but the corners paid for the speed with blurriness and artifacts. Even the centers of images were less than perfect. 

A 90mm f2.8 lens offers lens makers the opportunity to design something simpler and and easy to perfect. The Sigma lens, for instance, is sharp across the frame even when used wide open. And, at its widest aperture, and its closest focusing distance, there is just enough depth of field to do a good job with a portrait --- if you are careful to focus in the right spot. 

If you work as a commercial photographer doing portraits in studio and on location a small selection of the Sigma i-Series prime lenses, with the 90mm leading the charge, could be all a photographer needs for very sellable results. Combined with the small size and lower weight and you might find that upping your image quality while lowering your portage obligations is just what the art director ordered. 

I'm heading off to the big celebration in the park later this morning. It's the celebration called, Eeyore's Birthday Party. I've been going and photographing the characters there for decades. I'm just now packing. I've decided to bring two cameras and two lenses. Normally I'd bring just one camera and one lens but I'd like to use the 90mm for nice portraits and the 45mm for establishing shots. I've decided to put each lens on a dedicated SL body so I don't have to change them during the day. Last time I was at Eeyore's there was a lot of dust and we are also in full pollen season here in central Texas. And boy howdy! does that tree pollen do a helluva job sticking to exposed camera sensors....

I hope it doesn't rain. Or doesn't rain too much. I'd hate to see the event postponed. Now checking the website. 

Have a fun weekend. I've got a fun one all planned out. 

Continuous light for easier shallow depth of field. In the days of tungsten fixtures and huge scrims.

 Image created for the Austin Lyric Opera.

Dancer. In old Austin. Before the city's population explosion...

Long gone dance studio on East Sixth St. 

 Yesterday's project, photographing two attorneys, went off without a hitch. Files have already been selected and we'll do final post processing tomorrow. 

We're still moderating all comments because there is a person who is obsessed with leaving dozens of malevolent comments on the blog every night. It's not so bad. The comments are easy to bulk moderate. And Google is being helpful.  I guess it's just a sign of the times. Mental health issues everywhere. 

This weekend features (weather permitting!) the annual Eeyore's Birthday Party event at Pease Park in Austin, Texas. Costumes, painted faces, contests of strength and creativity and so much more. Starts around 11 a.m. and continues till dusk. Be sure to experience the drum circles... 

After a flurry of electronic flash purchases I've got nothing new to report. The Leica SF58 did fine. Nothing glitched. Nothing broke. 

We've had marvelous weather here right up until today. Now the temperatures are rising, the humidity is villainous and the pollen bearing trees, grasses and shrubs are in full allergy mode. A nice time to spend an afternoon in front of the computer...

Have a great weekend! 

Packing up for tomorrow's assignment. Subtractive lighting will be key.

 

Former CEO of Ottobock Canada. 

A different location from the law firm discussed below.

Over the last ten years most of my clients have evolved when it comes to executive portraits. We've moved past the traditional studio portrait and into environmental portraiture with gusto. Tomorrow I'll continue a series of portraits I started for a law firm here in Austin, adding portraits of two new attorneys. I'll be following a style that I set for them at the outset of our working relationship. It's all about making a nice portrait in the foreground and showing an out of focus rendering of the space behind the subject. The nicer the architecture and general/ambient lighting the more fun the photograph. 

The images for the law firm are done on location in their downtown Austin offices. From the outset I've done the portraits with LED light fixtures as my main lights. I started with LED panel lights ten years ago and over time I've upgraded the LEDs as better and better instruments have become available. I'm currently using Nanlite FS-300 Bi-Color (C.O.B.) units because they are bright, highly controllable, powerful, and reasonably priced. In all the time I've used the LEDs I have yet to come across a situation in which banding from the 60Hz A/C current has shown up. 

I'm a fan of big umbrellas as light modifiers and when I say "big" I mean the smallest umbrella I bring along is 60 inches in diameter and the usual umbrella I use as a main light is 72 inches in diameter. In addition to their size I try to use the umbrellas as close as possible to the subject. This results in a very soft but directional light with good fall off on the shadow side. 

I mentioned subtractive lighting in the headline and it's a very important part of my process, especially when working in an area where there are "can" lights in the ceilings that can't be turned off for the shoot. 

The can lights are almost always a poor photo rendering CRI and an ambiguous color profile, somewhere between Halloween orange and slime green. And the last thing I want is light from the ceiling mounted cans providing a hideous "hair light" on my subject. It's hard to correct in the photographs ... bordering on impossible. 

I want to be able to block the light coming from directly overhead and sometimes I want to block the light bouncing off a close by wall that's on the opposite side of my main light. A wall with white or light colored paint can sometime fill in too much and compromise the ratio of light-to-shadow on a face that I am try to achieve. To control or subtract the lights I don't want I bring two round pop-up disks that are 48 inches in diameter and can be set up with a black, light proof fabric on one side. Each subtractive panel requires a hardware piece to hold it in place and also to attach it to a tall light stand. And each panel requires its own light stand as well. 

In all I need to pack four fairly sturdy light stands, two modifier holders and a tripod in the stand bag. The Nanlites, the camera and lenses, and all the power cords get transported in a Manfroto roller case and everything, even the lighting case with wheels, gets lashed onto a Multi-Cart (like a Rock N Roller cart) to get the gear from the car in the parking garage, through the bank building lobby, and up to the 23rd floor. 

The lights and modifiers are the most important part of the kit and the camera and lens are mostly interchangeable between a range of options. As long as the lens is long enough to allow for a nice fall off of focus over distance. 

For tomorrow's adventure in portraiture I'm packing the Leica SL2 as my main camera and I'm pairing it with a 90mm lens. I haven't decided for sure whether I'm going to use the Sigma i-Series 90mm f2.8 or the Voigtlander 90mm f2.8 APO Skopar so I've packed both and I'll just let the photo spirits move me in the right direction. I have also packed an incident light meter and I've included the tiny Sigma fp camera (stripped down to its essential form) as a back-up camera; just in case. A few extra batteries and the case gets zipped up and put into the car. 

Even though I have photographed at this particular location about 60 times in the last ten years I'll start out by pulling out the camera, the lens and a tripod and roughing in how I'd like to position my subject in relationship to the background. I generally mark a position on the floor with blue "painter's" tape as an indication for where I'd like the subject to stand. I put a high backed office chair on the mark not for the subject to sit in but to use as an anchor for the subject. He or she will stand just behind the back of the chair and can use it as a convenient prop on which to rest their hands. The final crop is a "head and shoulders" so the chair, hands, etc. don't show up. 

While I'm setting up I sometimes use myself as a stand-in for the portrait subjects. Sometimes I get lucky and find an intern or assistant who can spare a few minutes to stand in and allow me to fine-tune distances and composition. The whole set-up process takes about 30 minutes, tops. 

After I've placed a chair and figured out the relationship between the tripod-mounted camera and the subject position I get to work blocking out the unwanted light with a light blocking round modifier. Then I add the main light --- and I don't know why but --- I always seem to light from my left or my subject's right. If there is a reason to go in the other direction I can usually tell in the first few minutes the subject is in place. With a big umbrella my rule of thumb is to place it no further away from the subject than the diameter of the umbrella. Closer if I want the light to be softer. But remember the inverse square law! The closer the light source to the subject the quicker the light falls off from one side of the face to the other. 

The final step is to add some more light to the background areas which may be 20, 30 or even 40 feet behind the subject. That's what the second light is really for. Usually I'll put the light into a decent sized hard reflector and put a grid on the front.  A tight grid is used because I want to make sure I don't over light the area just behind the main subject.

I meter to get into the ballpark and then fine-tune based on the EVF image in camera. For single subjects I nearly always use raw files, especially now when I want to be able to use A.I. noise reduction which is currently only supporting raw files in Adobe products. Achieving balance between background light and foreground is pretty critical but a lot can be done to "save" a file in post. Especially with the selection tools now available. 

In general the scene is best captured with the camera set to ISO 640, a shutter speed of 1/125th of a second and an aperture of f4.0 or f5.6. Go with the smaller aperture if you know you'll be treating the foreground and background separately; it all looks better if there is sharper edge detail to select against. 

I'll have the camera set to a white balance of 5100K. Seems to work best with the LEDs. 

The final tweak, as far as the lighting goes, is to adjust the subtractive light panels to the subject. I want to use them as close as possible but I have to keep in mind the angle of the main light --- which I don't want to the modifiers to block.

Then I smile my warmest and most gracious smile and we begin the photographic process. It's all fun and takes less time to do than to write about. And that's the long and short of it.

I have switched, over time, away from twin lights in softboxes to one big umbrella but this should give you and idea of the basic set up. The modifier on the right was used block light from bouncing off the yellowish wall and back onto the "fill" side of the subject's face. This image was done about four years ago... same just below.

the reverse.

Just going over in my head about what I need for tomorrow's sessions.

fun to be working.