Thunder, Lightning, Downpours, Oh My! It all adds up to....no swim practice this morning... But that's okay, I had a backlog of retouching to do on some portraits.

Every day is a little different (or a lot different; depending on your perspective). Yesterday was soupy and a bit chilly and it felt like the rain was going to arrive suddenly and with vigor. But it didn't. At least not until my stroll was complete. I'd written something about the sensors in both the Leica SL and Leica M240 cameras and I thought I'd just double check how I perceived files from that set-up since I had some spare time. 

I put a Zeiss 50mm f1.4 ZF.2 on the SL with an adapter, set the whole mess to operate in aperture priority with auto-ISO, set the exp. comp. to minus (point) .7 and ambled out of the house wearing a hoodie as a jacket. Then I just photographed anything that interested me with the intent of applying my favorite Leica Store Miami SL color profile and seeing how everything looks. I thought of using a bit of the ole A.I. noise reduction but decided just to go older school and let the files end up where they landed. 

Back in the studio, before I set out on my walk, I was compositing portraits of an executive I have known for decades into backgrounds of bustling trade shows. Backgrounds I generated in PhotoShop's version of Generative A.I. I was working hard at matching the color and feel of the foreground portraits with the fabrications in the background but after much trial and error I started to get the hang of it. And a slight layer of gaussian noise over the entire finished files helps cement them, perceptibly, as all of one layer. One solitary scene capture. 

But any time you find yourself in the weeds of a project that requires subjective decisions galore you'll know when it's time to put the project to sleep for a while and take a walk. At least I hope you'll know.

It's probably obvious but the things that make a composite work are have depth to your blur, matching the color palette between foreground and background and, of course, matching the direction of the light in both parts. After that it's all tweaking. 

The industrial and primitive nature of the hulking metal construct that is the original Leica SL (digital) is a nice antidote to a quasi-fantasy existence inside an image processing program. You feel the cement of the sidewalk under the soles of your boots. You feel currents of cool, moist air tickle your face and your exposed hands. You feel the weight of the gear over a shoulder, dangling from a strap when it's not in use. But mostly you see a never ending collection of visual delights as you motivate yourself down the street and around the next corner. There is also a willingness to give up the fiction of complete control one has when sitting tense in front of a computer and its addictive monitor. Stuff might happen. Dynamics in real life might fling a curve ball at you or toss you some delightful little award. Like bright magenta shoes...

And then it's back to work. Back home before the rain hits. And you barely have time to assess the files you've shot before moving on to the next event on your personal agenda. But here's my takeaway:

The SL files and the M240 files alike have a feeling of richness that's missing from more modern sensor cameras. Colors are richer. Shadows deeper. And there's a contrast that's almost like a nostalgic rendering of the best color slide films. Better? Up to you.... Reproducible from other cameras in post production? Sure. What's not? The thing I come back to again and again in the older Leica sensors is their ability to make the color red in a photograph seem both accurate and strangely exciting at the same time. Reason enough to change systems? Naw. You're probably already happy with what you've got. Why rock the boat? 

The café tables on Mañana's Coffee patio are battened down and secured in anticipation of heavy rains and strong winds scheduled into the first few hours of the evening. 

And the chairs. But not the leaves.

I know. I know. More mannequins. But this is different. This time I was responding to the way the clothing draped on the model and  the stark difference in scene color between the model in the window and the product all through the background. A reminder for myself that auto white balance generally sucks and the idea that sometimes you have to decide on one or another white balances in the same scene knowing you can't have both and a compromise between the two is just that.

Whatever I wrote just above applies here as well. Fun to see through the windows to the space around the corner. Guy mannequins sometimes look lame.

Currently in love with red shoes laces. Always in love with the look of industrial gratings. 

Austin, for the last twenty years, has been fascinated with big, outdoor bars and bars with big patios. 

I'm not a fan. If you are going to go out drinking with people it should be either in seedy bars with bad lighting or in the gorgeous lobbies of elegant hotels. Nothing in between. Outside is for swimming, walking, playing. Not for getting hammered. 

Shiny trees in the window of a sushi restaurant. 

Now back at work making trade shows and executive guys look natural and somewhat cool. 

Kinda lonely with one blog in the photo-sphere down for maintenance. I hope MJ is actually taking it easy and getting some restorative rest. Missing those occasional posts about photography....

 

A test shot from 2010 of Will. For an article for Studio Photography Magazine about the Leica M9 and the Leica 35mm f1.4 Aspheric lens.

Will van Overbeek at the old Trianon Coffee location. 

He is not a "Leica Believer...." 

But he is a famous and widely collected photographer...

 I'm having an interesting week delving into sensor technology as it relates to Leica. The Leica M9 is a bit of a cult camera which is actually rising in price on the used markets in spite of it being discontinued in 2012, having well documented sensor corrosion issues, and a now fleeting supply of usable batteries available to replace dying varieties. The reason usually given for its popularity is that the camera used an 18 megapixel,  Kodak CCD sensor designed specifically for this particular camera. On one hand there are a lot of people who seem to prefer the color and tonality of CCD sensors and on the other hand it was not an "off the shelf" sensor but one that used a thin AA filter and various physical modifications to yield a really good performance with M series lenses; especially of the wide angle variety. 

As the only M on the market at the time it was only to be expected that those who wanted a Leica rangefinder camera learned to love it completely. Flaws and all. After all, in the digital space, no other camera maker had stepped in to compete in that particular camera niche. 

Studio Photography Magazine had Leica send me the M9 and the lens in order to write a review of the two products and I certainly had fun doing it. There were things I didn't like about the camera but they mostly were about how loud I found the shutter and only a little bit about how messy the high ISO files got; noise-wise. There was a definite look to the files that was different than those from Nikon and Canon in those days. The blacks were a bit crushed which I think was a way of hiding shadow noise. The files had a harder contrast curve than the competitors but at the same time it was good with the tonality and roll off of the highlights. All assuming that one was working in raw. The Jpegs of the day ---- not so much. 

Coming from the very quiet cameras like the M3, M4 and even the M6s, the shutter in the M9 suffered by my ability to directly compare it to those stand out legends of quiet. Subsequent digital Ms have had progressively better sounding shutters. It's a little thing to most people but a big thing to others...

There seems to be a groupthink fallacy that the next generation of Leica sensors, those in the M240 series and the original SL are just re-badged Sony 24 megapixel, CMOS sensors but in reality the sensors were designed and made by two different companies and neither of them is Sony. Here's what the Wiki sez: 

"The M uses a CMOS 24-megapixel (6,000 × 4,000 pixels) image sensor designed for Leica by the Belgian company CMOSIS, and made by STMicroelectronics in Grenoble. The pixels are on a 6 x 6 μm² grid."

Interesting to me is that Leica used the same underlying sensor technology also in the original SL (601) that was launched in 2015. The emphasis was on making "film like" files with emphasis on eliminating the AA filters, keeping the rest of the filter stack as thin as possible and using micro lens technologies to keep light rays workable all the way to the corners and edges of the sensor when using wide angle, close back focus lenses. Those who could "see" a difference in color and tonal rendering have always had to deal with the "great unwashed" legion of "experts" who are now sure that only Sony makes sensors for full frame cameras. The reality is that the sensors used in Leica models up to but NOT including the SL2 were not Sony sensors. While they may have lagged behind on noise performance at higher ISOs many feel the look of the files is different enough to make it worthwhile to squirrel away those older Leica models. If that's the look you like.

Even though Sony "may" have produced the sensor in the SL2-S I think that sensor inherited much of the R&D on the design side from the 24 Megapixel cameras with BSI being a feature that Sony may have brought to the table with the SL2-S sensors. The SL2 is pretty much acknowledged to have its sensor come from the Sony catalog with with some filter tweaks to help out with the lens demands of rangefinder lenses. Which goes a long way towards explaining why I like the look of files from the SL and SL2-S better, across several parameters, than I do the SL2. And why I tend to hoard cameras that I like a lot. 

There are many myths rumbling around the camera world and the most persistent is probably the one about Sony making all the great sensors. I think they make the most cost effective sensors because they've gained the advantage of scale but there is still room for other players. At least there was up until the current rev. of Leica cameras. 

The old, 18 megapixel M9 was fun to play with and the bigger size of each pixel has a positive effect on the appearance of sharpness in the resulting files. Personally? I'm happy Leica moved on to the CMOS sensors in 2012. We gained a couple stops of better high ISO noise performance, probably a stop and a half more dynamic range, better battery life and faster throughput. Did we lose something? Only the choice of having a different style of color and tonal rendering which were in part compensations for the perceived shortcomings of the CCD tech. 

Takeaway? I wish I'd kept that 35mm lens. It was great!!! But the whole package had to be dutifully returned after the review was written. Leica offered to sell the package to me at a discount but I still had a house to pay off and a kid to put through college....so you know how that goes.... 

Turkey Legs and tacos. Red beverages for all. Sony A-77 SLT. In downtown Austin. Circa 2010

 

I could never honestly say that I "pre-visualized" this shot.

If you have a New York Times subscription you might be interested in reading friend, Paul Johnson's obituary. It's nicely detailed and paints the picture of Paul as we all knew him.

 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/dining/pableaux-johnson-dead.html?smid=url-share

 Thank You to Gordon Brown for kindly sending me the link.

Combining two happy ideas. Coffee and swimming. A nice respite on a long day.

 

Just hanging out by the pool at the Hotel San José.

I am sorely tempted to pick up another Leica SL2 since prices on used ones have plummeted in the last few weeks. I like the SL2. I like the SL2-S better and I like the SLs best of all. So, whenever the urge strikes me to overinflate my collection of SLx bodies I have an exercise I undertake. Something to bring back needed perspective. I grab my favorite SL (yes, I have two but favor the one with the most nicks and abrasions) and a lens like the Carl Zeiss 50mm f1.4 ZF, set the camera the way I like it and go out to take some photographs. With that camera and lens combination I find almost every photograph I take; especially those shot at wide apertures, rewards me with color and tonal palettes that are different than the newer cameras and more in line with my personal tastes as to what an image file should look like. 

And that helps tremendously to tamp down the siren song of desire for newer, later cameras.

There's a momentary feeling of mastery... until I remind myself that I am just a beginner, really. At the very start of my learning curve.

Being a photographer is, I think, a lot like being a barrista, a maker of coffee. Sometimes we get the formula just right and the water is perfect and the cup is pre-warmed and we end up with a very satisfying cup of coffee. Or a very nice photograph. Some days things go awry. Maybe the grind is slightly off, or the water has some mineral that flavors the mix and renders it just a bit off. Maybe the cup we pour into is too cold and we're left with the Hobson's Choice of drinking lukewarm coffee or putting the cup into the microwave oven to warm everything up. Timing is almost everything.

We can measure and measure but some things are just out of our control. Even down the to reality that every bean harvest is different and every click of the shutter is a combination of so many fragmented parts of our frail human process. 

But when you get it just right there's buzz that makes it all worthwhile. 

The best blog post I ever wrote. Seriously.

 https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2010/08/street-shooting-part-one-why-hell-would.html

It was 2010. I was grappling with the "why" of personal photography after two hard years of commercial doldrums brought on by the collapse of the creative economy. 

At a baby shower yesterday a fellow swimmer, Patty, who is a book editor asked me about the blog. She fished around for an example of what I valued in the blog.

The link above is the only thing I sent to her. If you've already read it then Thanks. If you haven't and you have a few minutes please do. It might make the current blog seem more sensible...

New Orleans lost a stellar human on Sunday. Paul Johnson was a very close friend... It's been a tough month for me.

 My friend, Paul Johnson, passed away in New Orleans on Sunday. He went by "Pableaux." He was 59. He was a renowned cook. A brilliant writer. A diligent photographer and so much more. I met him here in Austin way back in the late 1980s. He was working in tech and every once in a while he'd cook up a big ten gallon pot of gumbo or red beans and rice and invite every one he knew well and everyone he'd like to have known better over to his small house in Landon Lane and feed them. 

I once ran into Pableaux unexpectedly in Rome, Italy of all places. He'd left the tech world altogether and was writing and photographing about food from all over the world for the New York Times. I asked him what brought him to Rome. His answer: He'd pitched the NYTimes a story about the best gelatos in Italy and they had ante'd up the budget for him to do the story. He was walking through the Piazza di Popolo heading toward yet another gelato shop. The ultimate bon vivant. He enjoyed life with incredible energy.

My own special memories of Paul were about me teaching him photography and getting occasional phone calls, usually followed by visits for extensive lunches and consultations about which camera to buy and...how then to use it. Here is my epitaph for Paul:  I taught Paul how to do photographs. Paul taught me how to enjoy life.

I'll miss him very much. As will hundreds of other people. All of whom will consider him to have been a close and special friend.  Here's more information: https://www.nola.com/news/pableaux-johnson-dies/article_8dcbe608-dc49-11ef-93af-ebc56bc9752d.html

On Christmas day my family lost my little sister. She'd battled cancer for eight years and had recently undergone a bone marrow transplant. On Christmas day, just before her family arrived to celebrate she died suddenly. It was a devastating loss. And reminded me that my mom had also passed away at Christmas five years earlier. 

I won't go into any details about my sister. She was a private person and wouldn't want that. But not a day goes by that I don't think of her and try to deal with the sadness of our loss...

It puts our own lives, and the unknowable agenda the universe has for us, into clearer focus. Perspective. The great tragedy would be to waste the time we have for ourselves and with each other. Something Paul and Alison never had to grapple with. They were both fully engaged in their lives.

Too much personal information for a blog but there it is.

If it seems sometimes like I am wondering around aimlessly with a camera it might be because I am. 

Somehow I find it comforting that my friend, Paul died with his favorite camera in his hands, photographing one of his favorite subjects (New Orleans Parades) in his favorite city...