Lucy Lumen more or less nails it in her YouTube video about: "Are photographers too serious?" And I agree 100%

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NwN3CfpjL8

my all time, personal favorite photograph.

Technique? Sharpness? Dynamic Range? What's that?

It was a cold and gloomy evening.

 

But it sure was fun to be out photographing. And to wear the winter clothes we seldom get to pull out of the closet. 

Just another day spent mostly outside. No special cameras. Nothing to review. But I did buy something yesterday and it's supposed to be here in time for Saturday's video project.

I woke up. I drank water. I ate a handful of raw almonds and washed them down with a cup of coffee. I drove to the pool and used the heated steering wheel function in my car for the first time. It was pleasant. The walk from the locker rooms to the outside pool was quite chilly. The ambient temp at 7:59 was 28°f. No time for chit chat poolside. We were diligent. We swam a couple of miles under the mindful supervision of coach Jen. She likes to keep the swimmers moving. After the swim I had a breakfast of egg whites and kale. And black bread toast. And more coffee. Not a moment of my cuisine was time limited or calibrated like a fine Swiss watch. And it was all delicious.

I grabbed a camera off the end of the dining room table where it mysteriously ended up yesterday evening. It was the Leica M-E (typ240) and it was wearing a 50mm Planar ZM lens. I bundled up in a light down jacket, my favorite SmartWool hat and even traded the Birkenstocks for some sturdy leather shoes and thick socks. Then I went to Whole Foods for lunch. The flagship store has a wonderfully diverse hot food bar. I dived in and "curated" a fun lunch for a cold day. 

Chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes, green beans with carrots and red peppers, and some broccoli for good measure. A pleasant young woman sat at the table next to mine and, seeing my little camera asked if I was a photographer. I was able to answer "yes." She asked what kind of photographer and I told her I mostly photograph advertising for corporate clients. She smiled and went back to scrawling on the screen of her jumbo iPad with some sort of stylus. A new way of working outside the trad. office.

After finishing lunch I headed out for a walk though familiar territory. Sometimes I think it's silly to spend time walking variations of the same route on many days. But then I remember that most people go through their lives with real jobs. Jobs that require them to spend seven or eight hours every day, five days a week, fifty weeks out of each year, at a desk firmly anchored in the same spot under the same lights surrounded by mostly the same people and no one thinks to question that choice. Thinking about that makes my choices seem more comfortable to me. At the very least I can spend a lot more time practicing my distant vision and breathing mostly fresh air. And the options for coffee are also extensive and varied. And I don't spend time next to a cadre of annoying co-workers or employees. 

Today's route was a familiar three mile circuit. Nothing stood out as visually exemplary but I was paying more attention to the winter light. It's different. More angular. Bluer. More clinical on sunny winter days. I tried to capture that feeling in the images I took. I'll spare you the usual mannequin content. I felt as though the window dressers let me down today... for the most part. 

What lens did I buy? The one I'm waiting for? That would be the second generation Leica 135mm f2.8 R series lens. I'll use it with a Novoflex R to L adapter that a friend handed me. It's supposed to be very precisely machined... I owned the original V1 of the Leica 135mm f2.8 R lens many years ago; back when I was shooting with several R series bodies. Like the R5 and the R8. The lens worked well for me back then and the V2 is supposed to have a reworked optical construction. I bought this new (to me) copy from the Leica Store Miami. I like to buy Leica stuff from them because it arrives on time and in better shape than I expect each time. This particular lens was just cleaned, lubed and adjusted by a Leica technician and comes with a warranty. It wasn't particularly expensive because I waited to buy it until after the new year when the store dropped prices on used gear that was still sitting around. 

I don't expect this lens to knock me over with amazing optical performance but I do remember it being a very good performer when stopped down one stop. Even wide open the center of the frame is credible. I bought it because I have always liked the focal length and have divested all my longer zooms so I felt I needed, at least, to have that focal length covered to isolate subjects and also, at an upcoming banker's conference in Santa Fe, it will come in handy for photographs of speakers on stage or crouching behind a podium. For those applications its performance will be quite satisfactory. I wish Leica, Panasonic or Sigma would make a nice, compact single focal length 135mm f2.8 as an addition to all the various zooms on offer. But maybe that's just because it's how I got acculturated back in the film days. Back before zoom lenses were very good. My total outlay for this lens was a whopping $425. Not a wild amount. Not enough to raise the anti-veblen hackles of even the most parsimonious of blogger...

So, I did what I do every day. I exercised. I wrote stuff and I took photographs. With intention. The intention to be outside and immersed in the world. The photos I liked are below.

I take a stab at urban landscape photography. It's vague and pointless.

Henry White is certain to make fun of me for including this.

looking down at the plant beds at the power plant. No rearrangements were done. 

wouldn't want to trigger A.I. paranoia...

We'll have four or five nights where the outside temperatures will drop 

under 32°. All the businesses in downtown; well, the ones with outdoor plants,

we're busy yesterday and today covering the shrubbery with plastic. 

It made for odd decor.

Loving the sunstar from the Carl Zeiss 50mm Planar. 

It's pretty nice at f8.0.

the logo on the front building reads: HyperGiant. I am mystified. But I was too lazy to go out of my way to find out more. Maybe I can find the entity on the web...

Medici Coffee on Congress Ave. has an outside seating area. This quote is the decoration 

on one of the short walls...

This light looks like "winter" light to me. And the clouds look like winter clouds.

Maybe I'm reading in too much since I was also shivering at the time.

Next winter adventure item? Gloves.

New construction everywhere I looked.

My nod to Stephen Shore. Not one of Henry White's faves...

This one's going to have 57 stories. It's smack in the middle of downtown. 

I'm not comfortable with extreme heights. You'll never see me hanging out 

at the top of one of these cranes. Not in the cards... we'll send that job to Joe McNally.

This is a high tech device that will strip the Bayer filters right off your sensor in one go. 

I've heard Leica uses one of these to convert Q3 cameras to Q3M cameras. 

Or maybe it's for natural gas distribution. I'm just a photographer. 

How would I know? 

Off to find a scrumptious dinner with friends. 

More swimming, eating and photography tomorrow. For sure.

No revisions were wasted on this short blog post.

 

Perfectionism corralled. Knowing when to stop beating your head against the wall is the difference between a virtuous headache and a concussion...

 

It's all over the news today. The Arctic Blast is on the way. Soon we'll all be shivering under stacks of blankets, wrapped in layers of down and trying to figure out the once every two or three years secrets of the flue. How to open the flue. Why open the flue. And most important; how to start and maintain a warming fire in a small, mostly ornamental fireplace. Skills the average seven year old Canadian knows by heart. 

The fear of even the possibility that our pool will be closed because of weather on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday drove attendance to today's two morning swim workouts beyond the usual scope and the parking lot was worse for it. Being at least as entitled as everyone else on the team I made my own parking space by taking over the spots generally reserved for the silly golf carts some people in the neighborhood use to drop by and play pickle ball. They are obviously not a priority use. Not when timely attendance at swimming is factored in...

So, here's what we know: It might get cold. It might freeze during the early morning hours. The weather people are generally wrong so we might as well prepare for the worst and then revel at the end about the overly pessimistic predictions of our TV meteorologists (what? do they study meteors???). 

This has been a week of high mileage aquatic pursuits. We did 3,600 yards on New Years Eve, another 4,800 yards on New Years Day, solid yards on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and another 3400 yards today. The weather was gray and gloomy this morning --- at least at the start --- and just as we exited the locker rooms and headed out to face the day, post swim, the sun burst through and we've been under sunny skies ever since. Now the north winds are headed in and you can feel the temperature drop minute by minute. 

I predict that we'll swim every day of the week but Monday. That's when the pool is closed to settle itself and rest.

If anyone is keeping score I did re-write that last sentence twice but to no great improvement...

But now, with swimming reports complete let's talk about perfectionism in photography. My take? The more perfect the technique and execution the more boring the photograph. The images most of the fans of Photography (capitol P, as in Art...) prize and revere are those by folks like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Elliott Erwitt, Martin Parr, Alex Webb, Bruce Weber, and Josef Koudelka. Images that catch life on the fly. No time for fussiness. No time for perfect hospital corners. No time for relentless previsualization. Catch as catch can. Grab it (the scene) while it's hot. Gestalt reaction over ponderous calculation. And anyone that tells you that all these folks think much faster than any of the rest of us and are making adjustments at the speed of light are bucking against any semblance of reality. They are just a bit more fearless about reacting to stimulus by pushing the shutter button instead of taking yet another moment and reflecting. 

Those who fuss and fuss and fuss don't show up on any of my lists of top artists. I see them as plodding perfectionists who spend too much time sucking the life out of scenes in order to anesthetize the action and clean up the ragged corners of life enough to rob it of authenticity or even mildly joyous discovery. 

Landscape photographers are the oil painters of our generation. Static. Plodding. Occasionally a lovely riot of color but rarely worth a second look --- except maybe as candidates for staid decor. 

Writers are different. Words are different. I guess writers can ruminate and wrangle over exactly how to say something. How to write something perennially clever and illustrative. They don't have the burden of a binary response. An abrupt yes or no.  And if they gloss over the appealing angle of authenticity they have the special privilege of going back into a manuscript and resurrecting it. How wonderful. If that's what they are doing. But waving a flag and screaming "look how smart I wrote this!!!" is counter to the affections of an audience who never wants to see behind the curtains. 

Forcing tricky language to do too much makes the story flaccid. Sometimes the first thought is the best thought. Sure, you can mould it a bit like a flower vase in a ceramics class but eventually your interference in the process (sometimes called "tweaking") can destroy the original intention of design and turn your work from something that's perfect for displaying sprays of flowers into something you have to save by making it into another ashtray. Best not to touch a soufflé too often if you want it to rise as it should. Otherwise you just end up with a fancy but not very adequate omelette. 

When I rail against re-writing a story or endlessly re-bracketing and re-composing a photograph I'm never against the idea of improving the art but in many instances I see writers and photographers try too hard for something that's never going to be absolutely perfect. And most stuff has no chance. Poets can try endlessly to create the perfect carpe diem poem but they will never exceed the sheer brilliance of Andrew Marvell's "Ode to His Coy Mistress" no matter how many keystrokes they expend. And all the film or digital card space you can bring to bear will never really improve a poorly chosen photo subject rendered in poor light. Or create a worthy rationale for the existence of yet another Stephen Shore "urbanscape/baseball dugout" photo. Regardless of the hoping that a different format will provide some magic.

Getting art right is like falling in love. No one I know plans out the act of falling in love. No spreadsheets are created. Nowhere is there a perfect mechanism for getting someone to love you back. You have to be yourself. Be brave in putting yourself out there into a relationship and not be afraid to make declarations that are neither rehearsed or rewritten. You fall in love the way you make art. Second by second, inspiration in the moment. Unalloyed and undecorated by second thoughts and re-dos. You never get an arrow back once it's shot. There are no do-overs on a rocket launch. You just have to go for it. 

In my advertising work I sometimes have to throw away something I've spent time and energy on when, after sleeping on it, I get a flash of insight that there is a better way to show something. When that happens, if it's possible, I go back and reshoot. But when I'm shooting for myself there is no template I'm trying to match. I'm trying to recognize something as it is and capture it. And that always works better, looks better, feels better than anything I can set up and revise again and again. There is energy in the first attempt that goes missing on all subsequent desires to control the outcome. Tossing the muse out with the bathwater. 

A click of the shutter is the inception. The first draft is the inception. I can improve a lot of my favorite photographs in PhotoShop and I guess, in a sense that's revision. And if a story is well conceived making corrections that move it along even better is the kind of revision I can countenance. But to re-write for the sake of re-writing or because the story repeatedly falls apart because it's a failed story is outside my boundaries. At least for my process. Maybe it works for others. Fiction is stranger than reality and maybe you have to beat it with a stick for a while to make it work. But a non-fiction essay is straightforward enough to spring from most rigorous minds as close to fully formed as it needs to be. Puffing it up? Security blanket for the ego...

These are just my opinions. There are no studies to prove or disprove what I'm suggesting. But I'm certain that photographs get brutally re-worked much more often in the days of endless digital potential than they ever did when changes were hard and expensive. By the same token I think endless re-writing has become a more common process/practice since the days when Flaubert and Tolstoy committed their stories to actual paper with ink pens and no escape to "white out." Just a thought. Maybe modern convenience such as word processing software and computers has led all of us to overthinking and over nitpickiosity. Too much time trying to gild the edges of already perfect lilies in a vain and human attempt to make them more beautiful.

I think I'll buy some black and white film, put it in the old Nikon F and go out shooting gestalt style. Might take the tatty taste of perfectionism out of my mouth for a spell. 

If there are typos above rest assured I intended every one of them. 

Embarrassment of lens riches. The "forgotten 90mm."

 

There's a restaurant called, "Manny's" on West Fifth Street. I've never

been in. There's no indication about what cuisine I might find inside. But 

I find it curious that their entire front patio is covered with plants. 

And all the plants are plastic. Artificial. Ever green. 

It just feels so weird. 90mm.

somewhere in my swirling enthusiasm for Leica M cameras I ended up buying two lenses that I have mostly neglected. They seemed important enough to buy at the time but I pretty quickly remembered that rangefinder cameras aren't the best platforms for longer lenses. And by "longer" I mean anything beyond 50mm. But, in a blurry moment of optimism I bought a 90mm Voightlander APO Skopar f2.8 lens and also a Voigtlander 75mm f1.9 Ultron lens. Both are tiny compared to even the smallest lenses available in the same focal lengths for mirrorless cameras and much, much smaller than comparable DSLR lenses. 

after seeing them languish in a drawer after a few tentative and preliminary explorations I realized that they might be a lot happier working on a camera like the Panasonic S5 or a Leica SL2 where I could take advantage of great EVF viewfinders and our favorite shooting "crutch", in-body image stabilization. While I have a plump and bulky 85mm f1.4 that autofocuses it's a hassle to carry it around for fun, personal work and, for most of the daylight stuff I photograph the fast aperture is gratuitous. 

I also have a Sigma 90mm f2.8 AF lens that I find just perfect for paid portrait work, and I could tromp around town with that one on the camera but....there's something special about working with purely manual lenses. And, as we've pointed out ad infinitum, every lens has a different fingerprint. A different way of rendering images. A different feel when it comes to handling. 

yesterday I decided to bring my S5 camera and the 90mm VM APO Skopar along with me while I went for coffee on the outdoor patio at Mañana Coffee. And then for a walk through downtown. 

I had a Peak Design strap on the S5 but I finally decided that I really do hate those slippery straps. I thought to replace to with one of the retro, pale brown leather straps I bought from Small Rig instead. So, after getting a large cup of coffee and parking myself at one of the many empty tables looking out toward the ever busy pedestrian bridge across Lady Bird Lake, I set to work removing the Peak Design strap attachers from the camera and then the little metal rings themselves. After removing the offending strap I nearly broke a fingernail and a thumbnail attaching the round connecting rings of the new, leather strap. Whew. Always a burden. If I had a full time studio manager these days this is one of the many jobs I would foist onto him or her. I'm not fond of fiddly stuff. But I do like the straps. Once I get them broken in. 

the only lens I brought along was the 90mm. The package of the S5 and the rangefinder-sized 90 was pretty much perfect for walking around with nothing on my agenda other than just moving and thinking about a book I've been re-reading. It's called, "Bird by Bird." It' was written by Anne Lamott and it's ostensibly a book about "how" to write. I find it, really, a book full of funny small stories, anecdotes and self-effacing life advice. I especially like what she says about "perfectionism." 

I re-read the beginning of Lamott's chapter on perfectionism while gazing at lovely runners crossing the bridge in front of me and laughed out loud. I also thought of all those bloggers and novelists who obsessively re-write and re-write and rewrite until their work is predictable and overwrought... 

Here is Lamott's first paragraph: 

"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it." 

"Besides, perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force (these are words that we are allowed to use in California). Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived." 

Anne Lamott. From "Bird by Bird." 

After I read a couple of chapters and drank all of my coffee it was time to walk. And photograph. And giggle a little at my reminisces of what I'd just read. And I translated the title into photography by substituting: "Frame by Frame." 

What I figured out while walking around with my camera and lens is that pretty much all 90mm lenses made recently are pretty darn good, optically. I learned that small lenses designed for rangefinder cameras are wonderful because they are small and light and agile. While big 85mm f1.4 oughta focus lenses are the Disney Dancing Hippos of the lens world. (Movie? Fantasia!). 

Everything I shot looked like it came from a 90mm lens and a full frame camera. But the difference between the combo I was using and previous other set-ups is that this combo was fun to walk around with and easy to shoot. Just the way we always wish our camera systems were. 

It's interesting to get reacquainted with a camera or a lens you tried once and then put into deep sleep. On the reawakening and subsequent successful use one has to cogitate on whether something about the gear changed or something about you changed. I touched on perfectionism and I think bigger, more expensive cameras and uber-qualified lenses encourage it. Or maybe it's the feeling of the need for perfectionism that compels the initial purchase of big, expensive gear. It's always nice to have a respite from the best stuff because the absence of the highest-end gear leaves space for one to blame the equipment if you don't get exactly what you wanted from a photographic encounter. 

In the end, whether we're talking about keyboards or surfboards or cameras and lenses, it's really all about what the artist/operator brings to the party that matters. Everything else is just an excuse. Or something to blame.

My takeaway? Happy to have the Voigtlander 90mm APO Skopar in the camera bag. It works as it should and it carries even better. I will admit to one purchasing mistake. The silver lenses looks dorky poking out at it does from all my black L system cameras. It looks too slight. But who ever thought artists worried about aesthetics? Next time? A black finish, for sure!

I guess if I'm really going to use a brick wall as a lens testing device I should 

make the camera perfectly parallel with the wall. But I've never really 

landed on lens testing as a life's work....

And, in the most severe test of a camera and lens...the red dresses of the post-holiday mannequins. 

At some point in the future I may write about the 75mm lens. It's sweet. 

A new idea for cameras that offer a "flat" setting in their Jpeg menus.

I've been playing around with my Panasonic S5 camera because it's part of the L mount alliance, it's smaller and lighter than the other full frame L cameras I have, and because the files from it look just great. It has more "canned" Jpeg profiles than do any of my Leica cameras and one of the profiles I like in the S5 is the "flat" one. As you can see from the samples here, the flat images are, well, flat. The dynamic range is compressed so that shadows don't block up too quickly and highlights don't burn out until you really push them. The files are like flat negatives that are begging for #3 contrast papers. 

The Sigma fp offers a similar setting only it's called, "off." Which means that no profile is applied and the file is similar to an unprocessed raw file, only without as much bit depth. Both cameras offer a very flat profile which reminds me of Log files for video. The benefit, at least from my point of view, is that these flat files are very malleable. Cooperative. Configurable.

You can make the midranges contrastier, keep the shadows open, tone done aggressive highlights and move colors around without the files hitting the edges of their performance bubbles too quickly. Sure, you could shoot raw and do the same (and more) but for many situations in which color correction isn't fraught with peril you can instead choose to use Jpegs and have the advantage of working with much, much smaller files. 

That's all. Just wanted to mention the presence of flat files and non-profiles in case you glossed over that in the 395 page owner's manuals...

Sign rendered useless without punctuation...

 

We jumped the fence and swam in their pool. How could we not? The sign clearly says that no trespassers will be prosecuted....