Out of the desk drawer and out onto the streets. What's the "new" camera and has it replaced all that Leica junk I've wasted my money on over the last four years? And counting.

In a vain effort to be exceedingly well prepared to make my clients outrageously happy with my work I've spent a small fortune on pricey, apparently "Veblen" German cameras over the last four years. I've also spent outrageously on lenses to go with the cameras. I've bought batteries that, ounce for ounce, are more precious than gold or silver. 

Whatever was I thinking? How could I have been so blinded when the only camera I ever really needed was right there in the desk drawer of my home office. The one in my house. A camera that sat patiently in that dark drawer, along with four batteries and a charger, for four long years.

You must be wondering. What is this miracle camera that the misguided blogger is speaking about? Is it real or some Unicorn type dream? "Tell me more!" you might demand. So I will. 

First we have to agree that no human need ever use a camera with more than 12 megapixels. That's as good as or better than film. Right? No sense going higher because our inkjet printers won't show up the difference and only a gifted photographer with decades of experience could tell the difference between the output of a 12 megapixel camera and images from a 60 megapixel, full frame camera equipped with one of those overpriced APOchromatically corrected (a made-up word?) lenses that suckers buy for no good reason. And we also have to agree that zooms are superior in every parameter to those antiquated "prime" lenses. That's more of less a given. 

I don't want to keep you in suspense so I'll tell you that the change I'm thinking of making is to vintage Japanese cameras from the world's greatest camera maker: Canon. Yep! They originally supplied the camera that lived in the drawer. It's light was hidden behind wood panels. It's potential denied while I pandered to lesser cameras. But now I've seen the light. Metaphorically and literally --- so here we go. Take a gander at the stuff I shot today as I was walking around today in the mists. They are below. And the camera will be revealed in the final two frames. Rush to buy one of them. Dump everything you've been suckered into buying. It's a new reality and I certainly don't want to get left behind....

or should we say, "Best Lens in Town!"?

Not my car. But some owner of a brand new Audi is going to be royally pissed off when he or she rushes down to this parking lot, running late for a very important meeting and is....delayed. 

From half a block away! Try that with a Q2!

My least favorite name for a bar on Sixth Street...

Free color checker chart for newly unearthed cameras!

PMS 185?

Nocturnal land sharks. The noble AquaDillo.

checking that unbelievable color once again.

and again.

From across four lanes of a busy street. 

this is, apparently, only possible by renouncing camera lust for all time.

it's a recurring message. It's everywhere.

Unbelievable. Who could have known that I already had access to the ultimate Mannequin Photography gear? And it was right in front of my nose. But in fairness most cameras end up right in front of my nose... So there is that.

And not a hint of flare from the 100,000 watt light fixture at the new coffee shop.

Just opened at the W Hotel in downtown. 

Need depth of field controls? It comes as standard equipment. 

decisive moment photography waits for no AF system!

The big camera reveal.

Drum roll. Gasps!

Here it is: 

Wait. I'm busy composing on the back screen...

Ta-Da. In the locker room at the swimming pool before noon practice. 

That was the moment all the magic came together for me.

It's the legendary Canon G15 camera. Twelve magnificent megapixels of color accurate glory with none of the stinky Veblen attached. Just pure, bulletproof imaging from the best of the best. Brought to us by the year 2012.

Christmas came early. 

If you put your mind to it everything starts coming up with diagonals.

Out and about in the gray gloom today. Getting nearer to Christmas and the traffic magically becomes worse and worse. But...there are fresh pecans on the ground and all the cameras still work. This is the last image from today's walk. Before I climbed back in the car and headed home. I took it with an ancient but only recently unearthed point and shoot camera. More about that in the next post...

Black and white images for a gloomy day of photography.

Who doesn't love silver party dresses?

Yeah. It's an endless cycle of swimming, doing as little work as possible, long walks with a camera and writing the blog. Broken up by dinners with family or friends, or family and friends. When I get motivated I go to the gym for some resistance workouts but mostly I fritter away time trying to write the second "Henry White" book and swilling coffee in various coffee shops. If the stars line up, and the cameras stores catch up with me while I'm in a vulnerable/gullible mood, I rush to buy some esoteric camera or lens for which I have no real need. When the buyer's remorse kicks in I rush to a computer to see how the stock market looks in a snapshot. If it's in positive territory my angst is assuaged and if the markets are falling I too am crestfallen. Again, the inglorious cycle.

I bought a new light this week. It's a 14x26 inch, flat LED panel made by Nanlite. More or less takes the place of a small soft box and since it's only three inches deep it takes up less room on a set. I like it enough to want a second one. Until I stop myself and remember that I'm trying to go cold turkey on all jobs that might require new equipment. The new light does work well, and it is of the "bi-color" variety, so that's fun too. 

I spent the morning doing a long walk through the hills. I went to the noon swim practice today.  I got to the pool and it was cold, gray, rainy and windy. I changed into my swim suit and walked out to the pool deck. I was the only one there. Then, right at noon, our coach Annie, showed up carrying a small white board with the sets written on it with colored markers. I put on my swim cap and adjusted my goggles. I wondered if it would just be me, my coach, a couple of lifeguards, the groundsman and the club barrista. Yes, I am kidding. There is no club barrista. If you want coffee to drink while you swim you have to bring your own from home or suffer through something from the guard shack's Keurig machine. 

About five minutes into the warm-up Moira showed up, which was a relief. I would have felt guilty keeping a coach out in the weather just to supervise one person. Maura and I swim well together. I have the years of hard won technique on my side and she, at twenty-some years younger has the endurance. 

I have one more commercial job to do before we shut down everything for the year-end holidays. It's a single portrait that I'll photograph in the studio sometime next week and then composite together with a conference room image as a background. I've already shot the conference room. That image is sitting in a folder on my desktop--- as a reminder. Then we're on to the next year. 2025. I don't know what to expect. I'm guessing it will be much like 2024 in that my interest in doing work for other people will continue to diminish until I've alienated or scared off the rest of the clients. An interesting goal to work towards. 

Just a quick note about the Thypoch 28mm f1.4 M series lens I bought a couple of weeks ago. It's very good. I didn't like using it at first for the same reason that I didn't really warm up, at first, to the Carl Zeiss 28mm I bought earlier in the year. The frame finder lines in the viewfinders of my M series cameras are hard to see well with or without glasses. Recently I bought the bright line finder that Ricoh made for the GRiii; the 28mm equivalent version of the camera. The optical finder fits right onto the hotshoe on the M240s and is a much nicer viewing experience. Both lenses are now vindicated--because they are now a cinch to use. The CZ is sharp everywhere but slow at f2.8. The Thypoch is almost as sharp but one gets two extra stops in the low light and that's nice too. 

When I use the Thypoch 28mm on a mirrorless camera, like the Leica SL2-S, I appreciate that it focuses closer than does the Zeiss lens. Something like .4 meters versus .7 meters. Doesn't sound like a lot but in practice it's convenient and visually --- different. But when I get tired of juggling cameras, adapters, bright line finders, et al I find it much more convenient just to drop the Leica Q2 in the camera bag and depend on it for my wide angle pursuits. Horses for Arrows, Courses for Indians. Which is no longer politically correct to write but....hardly matters in the current milieu. 

Now considering driving back up to the camera store to buy...just one more of these darling light panels...I wonder how the traffic is today.

Air conditioning at the tiniest bar in Texas. 

Yep. That's me. Getting longer every day. On the bridge between the library and downtown proper.

And now ---- the mannequins. 

Industrial equipment at the retired Seaholm power plant always looks good in black and white. 

Want details? We got details. And brick walls! Micro-contrast galore.

One day one hundred years in the future the important museums will dig into my enormous archive of day-to-day, mundane photographs and create an entirely new theory about what all went wrong in the 21st century. Count on it. I bet the curators are digging through my trash cans right now....

A note to other bloggers: Please don't tell me again how we used to do things in the "good ole days..." Seems those topics are on an endless loop at various blogs. 

Endless Q2 photos here. That's the camera with the very good black and white mode. But at the touch of a menu item it can also shoot in color. Sadly, I hear that I lose 25% of the resolution to the interpolation of the Bayer pattern layer on the sensor. That's okay with me because the sensor has 47.5 million pixels. I can afford to go without a few. Especially for images that get used on the web. 

Not that I'm keeping close track but.... we hit 32,000,000 direct page views earlier today. Not bad for a site that was on vacation for a while...

 

Yes!!!!!

But wait! How about the next thirty two million??? What about that?

celebrating with a large, Columbian Supremo with a dash of creme.

original painting of a to-go coffee cup by Kirk

A cool and slurpy morning. What to do? I know. How about a walk in the rain with a camera?

 

It was chilly this morning. Well, not by the standards of the northern reaches but still enough to entice me to pull the warm covers up tight and get an extra half hour of sleep. Something novel happened next. I awoke to the sound of persistent, random raindrops smacking against the roofing shingles. Amazing that rain could seem so novel but such is the experience of living through a series of long droughts. 

It was 48° here when I finally climbed out of bed and threw back the blackout curtains. The morning outside was foggy gray. So was my head. Both literally and metaphorically. I tossed on a favorite sweatshirt, the pants I wore yesterday, and the day before, and capped off the outfit with an old pair of comfortable, somewhat water resistant, walking shoes. Made my way down the long hall to the kitchen to carefully make another perfect cup of coffee.  

I found an old, worn rain jacket in a bedroom closet, grabbed a small, point and shoot camera and drove onto the center of town to walk through the sometimes mist sometimes rain and to see what the town looks like when thoroughly damp. It looks...shiny-er. Like when the production crew sprays down a street with water on a movie set. Cue the water truck.

At first I tried to cover my head from the rain with the jacket's hood and also to keep the small camera under the wrap of the garment. But the hood screwed with my peripheral vision and I quickly abandoned it, tossing it back and then vaguely worrying about it slowly filling up with rain water. 

I was wearing my eyeglasses when I left the car but without the protection of the jacket's hood they soon became rather useless as tiny rain drops multiplied, covering the front of the lens and making everything seem novel and somehow poorly filtered. I wiped the raindrops off on the front of my sweatshirt and put them into a convenient coat pocket. Writing this reminds me, in the moment, that I need to go and rescue the glasses from that coat that's hanging on a hook in the studio simultaneously drying off and also dripping onto the hard floor....otherwise I'll consider the glasses lost and spend forever searching them down.

Taking off my glasses was good and bad. Good, in that I could now see the full frame in the camera's viewfinder without having to move my eye around, but bad in that I needed to stop, find a relatively dry spot, the overhang of an awning, to adjust the diopter for the camera's viewfinder. Problems I didn't have earlier in my career. Before glasses. Oh shucks. The ravages of age. 

Austin has a property that is a distinct negative for photographers who like to walk the streets and look for interesting things/people to document. That property is a lack of pedestrian traffic anywhere. The city possesses such an overwhelming car culture that people stare, almost surprised, through their windshields, at lone pedestrians who are crazy enough to walk through the rain, into and out of the crosswalks, with a camera in their hands and no "common sense" in their heads. This is doubly so when it rains, or gets too cold or too hot. But what it means for the ambulatory artist is a paucity of humanity out and and around to add some spice to our photography.

I settled for the sides of buildings. Naked trees. Repeating patterns. The skeleton of of downtown. The less exciting fallbacks of a frustrated, would be, art photographer. 

Then, when my hair, the lower legs of my trousers and the top of my camera were thoroughly soaked, and I had completed the walking circuit I had in mind, I came home to monk-like prepare a solitary lunch of greek yogurt, Swiss muesli, walnuts and fresh blackberries. 

I ate my usual concoction while watching a doltish vlogger complain about the awkward design of the Leica Q3-43 camera as it relates to handhold-able comfort as he held the camera in one hand at the end of a fully extended arm and shot by squinting at the rear screen.

I sent him a note suggesting that a two hand hold of a camera (any camera) was the correct way to use it and....a much more comfortable hold on any camera. He responded by saying that I should be aware that he has "only two hands..." By which I think he was suggesting that he needed to do the precarious and painful one handed, arm fully extended, vertical hold on his $7,000 camera so he could have his other hand free to navigate and manipulate his video camera. Very droll. And quite stupid. Especially if you are trying to explain/complain about camera haptics to an audience of experienced professionals. The camera in question hardly being "entry level." And a camera body design possessed of 70+ years of nearly unchanged tenure testifying to it's comfortable use by millions of right-minded photographers.

The photos here aren't my best work but I did diligently use both hands on the camera in their creation. I blame a photographer named, Manny Ortiz for propagating the silly process of holding heavy cameras at arm's length so he can create a disjointed video of the photography of ample, female subjects cavorting like models while he extols the virtues and vices of whatever the latest camera sent to him by the clever P.R. agencies of the camera makers. It's a vicious cycle on YouTube. One person shows off bad technique and the world rushes to emulate. Tragic. It's all so "one handed."

I'm back home safe and dry in my office. The little space heater is roaring in the background. I need to work on post processing a project for a client but here I am, once again, pounding away on my keyboard fully cognizant that some overly anxious and pathologically kind reader will take me to task for having the temerity to call out a "fellow" photographer for his egregious display of bad camera handling. And the vlogger's subsequent complaint about an innocent camera's hampered haptics. Again, Tragic. 

Jeez, Golly. It's well past time for a haircut...

The city of Austin decorates a public park in an upbeat and happy way for the upcoming holidays. I hear one of the other parks is showing statues of zombies hungry for brains. Okay. Onward.

The repeating pattern goes one way.

The repeating pattern goes the other way.

The jolliest of Christmas decor in all of downtown is found, appropriately enough on the window of a night club. Making that connection between holiday cheer and pricey drinks. 

Brick wall test?  No. Just a brick wall.

Gloom scrolling. 

And this was the general feeling throughout the day.

Chilly and wet. Gray and damp. Nothing much going on.