"Oil Changes?" "The World is Failing Apart and you are writing about oil changes?!!"

 Four Italian men debating the frequency of oil changes. No resolution at this time...

Hasselblad Street Imaging. Film. Old film. Slow film. Manual lenses. Primitive. 

It's ten o'clock in the morning and I'm sitting at the Subaru dealer waiting for an oil and filter change. Barrista engaged. OT

Car maintenance and coffee. Intertwined.

So, I bought a fun car last year and I've been having a blast driving it around central Texas. It's the first car I've owned with a turbo-charged engine since my ill-fated turbo-charged Volvo 940 wagon which I owned back in the early 1990s. Turbo charged engines were an iffy proposition back then. Texas drivers didn't know that you had to handle them with kid gloves if you wanted the turbo to last... The big culprit was heat. Both the heat generated by the turbo apparatus but also the ambient heat in Texas Summers. The secret, I've learned, is that you have to let the engine idle for a minute or so after a spirited drive so the oil can continue to flow across the super-heated turbo-fan bearings. And, apparently, that advice is entirely relevant to current cars with turbos. The best secret though is that you have to think of oil as something that needs to be replaced more frequently than most car makers' suggestions. Certainly not every 12,000 miles. Iffy at 6,000 miles. But just right at about every 3 to 4 thousand miles. Additionally, if you are a low mileage driver, it's good to change the oil every six months whether you hit the minimum milage or not. Oil breaks down with time as well as with heat.  There's no consensus about oil changes except from people who are avid, performance oriented drivers. In the minds of car cognoscenti the more often you change oil and filters the better. Period.

Since I bought the car I've hit 9,000 miles on the odometer. Today will be the third oil and filter change for this car. After this change I'll probably settle into doing it every 4,000 miles. A good compromise between the ultra conservative three thousand miles and the manufacture's recommended 6K. It's not that much of a hassle and the coffee at the dealer's lounge is pretty darn good. Not good enough for Europeans though because it's served in paper cups. Quel Dommage. 

A photo of the coffee station at the dealership. The coffee is free. The snacks are free. The energy bars? Free. The fresh fruit? Free. Am I paying for it with higher service prices? Does it really matter?

The Legacy Sport, like nearly all current Subarus, has all wheel drive. That makes tire conformance important as well. As you might have guessed I do ask for a tire rotation with each oil change. Even wear is good for the tires and even better for the transmission components.

I like cars. Maybe it's because I grew up with cars being a symbol of independence and freedom. Texas is such a big state that getting anywhere is a long adventure and back in the 1970s, when I started driving, the idea of public transportation was a pipe dream here. 

I'm currently looking at maybe buying a Subaru BRZ as a fun diversion. It would be in addition to the Legacy and not as a replacement. I borrowed one from the dealer over a weekend and it was so much fun to take around hard corners and wiggly roads... Funny, it's the one performance car that Subaru offers which doesn't have a turbo-charger. It's also rear wheel drive. And pretty much a two seater. My only reticence is the six speed, manual transmission. I learned on a "stick" and owned a series of primitive Volkswagens which were all manual transmissions so the process of shifting gears came back to me quickly. But driving in a more crowded set of roadways makes constantly shifting feel laborious. Maybe I should just stick to one car and more cameras...

In the last week or so I've run into something that rarely strikes. I am absolutely bored with photography. Bored with cameras. Bored with lenses. Bored with walking around taking photographs. Bored by clients. Pretty much all I've wanted to do for the last week or so is head to the pool and knock out fun workouts or sit out in the shade in the backyard and read novels. Fun dinners? Sure. Coffee with friends? Absolutely. But taking photographs? Not so much. I guess it's akin to writer's block. I think it's just my brain sending me a message that it's time to find something new. A new experience. A new idea. I know that cameras aren't the magic bullet for this so I'm not surprised that my time spent "researching" new cameras has dropped to near zero.

Ditto with looking at new work on Instagram or any of the other share sites. It all feels like a hollow replay of past work and past trends. An endless supply of half-naked young woman interspersed with uninspired landscapes and uninspired street photography. It almost embarrasses me to keep posting...

I think there is something about being immersed in culture and arts for so long that makes for a diminishing of passion for the work. If you've been around long enough you've seen so much of it before. There are only so many stories and, yes, I know that everyone tells theirs in their own way but if the skeleton of the stories stay the same the thrill of discovery fades.

I pulled an "old" camera out today. It's a Leica SL2. It was introduced in 2019 and improved year over year with five or six firmware upgrades. It's big. It's heavy. It's a beast. But I really do like it. For some reason the AF lenses didn't inspire me today. Too easy. Too automatic. Instead I looked through the lens drawer and found an old Canon 50mm f1.4 FD lens. It focuses manually. There is no data shared between camera and lens. It requires one to focus by hand and pay attention to set apertures. 

The adapter I'm using is one made by Urth. It has a ring that allows you to focus with the lens wide open and the to turn the ring to stop the lens to your selected f-stop for shooting. Focusing at a very wide aperture generally means more accurate focusing. Stopping down covers any small focus shift at different apertures. It's actually pretty elegant. And a reminder about how much paying attention to f-stops matters. 

With so many modern 50mm lenses in the market, and with more introduced every week, we tend to forget just how good the older lenses could be. Sure, there are superman "normal" lenses with a dozen elements, lots of aspherical glass and a near endless supply of aperture blades but, in reality, most of the 50mm lenses; the super deluxe and the ancient favorites, are designed around a basic design that's been instrumental in normal lens design for over 100 years. Coatings have gotten much better. Additional lens elements work to gain a bit of performance when a lens is used at its maximum apertures, and it's debatable as to whether or not automated and computer assisted manufacturing techniques have really dramatically move the needled of sharpness, etc. Essentially, from my experiences with high resolution digital cameras, once you stop down to f4.0 or (for sure) f5.6 any differences between the latest $5000 lens and the $100 used manual lens (if it was top of the line when introduced...) are minimal to non-existent. I'd wager that image stabilization in cameras is a much bigger determinant of image quality for most shots and for most people.

The Canon FD lens is sharp in the middle of the frame. Well sharp enough even at f1.4. It gets better and better as it approaches the middle apertures. The lower number of lens elements coupled with lens coatings which were state-of-the-art at the time of the lens's production go a long way toward minimizing flare and boosting contrast. It's a nice look. A really nice look. 

When I use the old Canon do I pine for the $2200, three pound, Leica certified, Panasonic S-Pro 50mm f1.4 I used to own? Not a bit. The differences when used the way most people use a lens are.....minimal. What did I pay for the old Canon 50mm? Hard to say. it came bundled with an old Canon FTb that I bought to pass along to a younger friend who wanted to try film photography. I paid $125 for the pair. So, I'll peg my investment in the Canon at around $75. It's much smaller and lighter than the big Panasonic. Same as with the Zeiss Milvus 50mm f1.4 that I recently sold off. Both of the newer lenses were very sharp wide open but both of them, in the end, are too bulky and heavy to be rational, everyday carry lenses. By a long shot. 

I've got the camera set to make higher contrast, black and white Jpegs. I hope they are not excessively sharp. I hope whatever I shoot with the combo has some character. Which means I have to have a willing acceptance of various lens faults. Or desired points of optical personality. Subjects? Mostly people. Mostly friends. 

Counting down the minutes until my car is delivered back to me. I'm wondering if I have time for one more Cappuccino.... probably not. 

Finally, watching the markets collapse. What does it feel like to lose so much in one week? .... Disquieting.

The cost of an oil change? The least of my worries.

It's always nice to have lenses that are sharp when used wide open. There are times when you want the backgrounds to blur away...

 

One of the things I always liked when using a 180mm f4.0 Zeiss lens on a square format, film Hasselblad was the ability to photograph with it wide open and still get high sharpness in the areas that were supposed to be in focus. With medium format even f5.6 at that focal length seemed to give me very narrow depth of focus. When I choose lenses for my 35mm sized digital cameras I find that the better corrected the lens is at its widest aperture the nicer my portraits look; at least to me. 

I've gone down the path of trying very inexpensive, fast lenses only to be disappointed most of the time the time. One of my favorite portrait lenses right now is the Voigtlander 50mm f2.0 APO-Lanthar. It's an exquisitely sharp lens at its widest aperture. I know, it's only a 50mm so it doesn't really fall into the traditional focal length range for portraiture. That's why I sometimes use it on an SL2 camera which is 47 megapixels at full frame and still 22 megapixels when using the APS-C crop. When I use it in that fashion it's great for classic studio portraits. 

The lens costs about $1,000 new but it's better than my Carl Zeiss ZF.2 50mm f1.4 or the Voigtlander 58mm f1.4 when either of those lenses is used at f2.0. And when used wide open at f1.4 neither of those older lenses is sharp enough across enough of the frame to get the sharp/soft look I want in a portrait.

Could be that a 50mm APO when used on an APS-C camera or on a camera with a crop that equals 75mm is a glorious sweet spot for making convincing portraits of people. 

I do, however, miss the longer lenses on a big, big, fat medium format film frame. We gave up too much when we all moved over to digital. It just wasn't ready yet...

But in today's imaging environment fast, sharp, well corrected APO lenses get us back to the quality levels we appreciated. Finally.

video got some attention at the SXSW show. Black Magic had a presence...

 6K sounds good. Their booth was mostly about live-streaming productions...

No presence for any of the still camera makers. No photography showcases. It's like photography has fallen off the radar for many.

More for us! 

Flat-atecture. Seems to be a style film guys really like. Lots of gray space. Not a lot of snap.

 

I went to the SXSW Expo today. I got a free keychain.

As we float through the turmoil of the modern world looking for interesting things to photograph, and looking at all of the things we thought would provide fun images for the foreseeable future, we see that many are now vanishing. SXSW in Austin started as a music showcase for up and coming bands. Edgy bands. Bands looking to get their first contract. The first show, in 1987 drew a total audience of 750; more or less, and the sponsors were local magazines, night clubs and a handful of shops. 

The conference took off. By the end of the 1990s it was the place to be for a week in March every year. Twitter launched there. A ton of other tech launched there. Big name, long tenured rock bands made appearances. And then, in another evolution, the originators of the music festival turned it into something even bigger. It became a full on conference with speakers from the left side of the political spectrum, zany billionaire entrepreneurs, and a raft of tech bros too numerous to list. They also added a film festival to the roster --- and then an education component that starts a week before the "real" conference. 

The conference hit its stride and its highest attendance numbers around 2007-2016. The downtown area of Austin was packed with sleek, young, wannabe rock stars, wannabe tech bros, wannabe movie directors and even aspiring writers. Everyone had an invention idea in one pocket and a movie script in the other pocket. Corporate showcases were rampant, ubiquitous, unavoidable. Traffic almost unbearable. Concession prices for bad coffee were off the charts. And in every hand --- the newest iPhone. In every backpack--- the newest laptop. And black. Everyone wore black. 

The swag was off the charts good back then. Free food and alcohol everywhere. Free hats and t-shirts. Free phone chargers. Samples of the latest energy drinks flowed like Niagara. And the whole bubbly, frothy event was always well documented by flocks of photographers and videographers. 

One year I worked for Sony Music and shot all the main stage music acts for three long days (and nights) in a row. Another year I worked for Samsung in one of their giant venues (free phone charging and all the free coffee anyone wanted to drink). We did a year for a P.R. agency that sent a New York pastry chef who made "Cronuts" for the first 1200 people to wait in line at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel. Dominique Ansel... I think. 

But most years I just headed down to absorb the Zeitgeist. To feel the carnival spirit of several hundred thousand young people (and more than a few old timers) who had recently escaped the leashes of parents and college to coalesce around the idea of "the next cool thing" and maybe discover great new music. In some sense people rightly saw the event as a potential career builder. And they were probably right --- back in the day. All the biggies from Dell to Samsung to Microsoft had big footprints...

Sadly, this is the last year the event will be held in the "ancient" (22 year old massive) Austin Convention Center. The city is demolishing it in order to build one twice as large --- you know: "build it and they will come." But we'll be flying without an enormous venue for at least three years...

I guess it will all work out. The attendance for the last couple of years has been dismal. The vendor showcase (the Expo) is a tiny fraction of the size it was in the last decade, and now, instead of wild new tech products the mix of vendors is similar to a typical tired, bad convention. Beauty products, travel agencies, dolls for kids, vague software applications that aim to "bring all your management tools together in one place!!!" No. I have no idea why I need or would want that. Is life so complicated that you need a whole program to figure out where to have dinner tomorrow or when to pay your Netflix bill?

In the expo today companies were hawking electric bikes, ear cleaners, Korean advertising agencies, captioning services and stand up desks. One small booth even had a machine that would allow you to press your own vinyl records. They didn't seem to understand the original appeal of records as relatively uncompressed data. They were busy telling potential buyers that it would be easy to pull music off CDs and press an original 33.3 vinyl record. Compression at every end of the process.... And who has CDs anymore?

The show this year has far fewer attendees. Not so easy to sell all show passes once the buy-in price tops $2,000. And your economy is fast-tracking towards recession.  You have to have a pretty cool job at a really young age to ante up for that, along with the over-priced Austin hotel rooms, and the outrageous local restaurant prices. Oh....and the $20 cocktails. 

It's kinda sad for me to see bright eyed, optimistic people who chased the latest thing replaced by the same folks you see manning the black draped booths at car shows or boat shows or, God Forbid, RV shows. Passing out free samples of skin cream and packets of stickers for your kids. The old guard of the show didn't have kids --- they were having too much fun. They didn't push face cream they were busy marketing dreams.

So, I've been downtown for three days this week trying to find the fun that used to saturate the previous SXSW events. It's elusive. If I hit the music clubs at night it might be more lively but the photo opportunities more vague. 

The first day I went down with a Leica SL2 and the Sigma 85mm lens. It was a good combo. Good shots in a previous post. But nothing off the chart exciting. The next time I went down it was with a Leica M240 camera and a Zeiss 50mm lens. That was good too. Today I knew I was going to spend the bulk of my time there in doors at the expo. I brought an older SL along with an AF 50mm lens from Panasonic. It worked pretty well and even the photographs I did at ISO 1600 look fine and dandy. A paean to 2015 technology...

I'll give the show one more go. An evening adventure on Sixth Street. I hope the fun, Hip Hop artists and various indy bands make it out into the streets as they have in years past. They had the energy and they made for good photographs. But it feels like the last year here.

If they do hold the event in Austin, Texas next year they'll have to break up the conferences, workshops, expos, etc. into a bunch of smaller venues. Something that comes with its own set of problems. Like getting from one place to another, parking, and smaller crowd sizes also means cheaper speaker options, etc. 

But like everything there is a parabola to the trajectory of most events, businesses and undertakings. You start small, then  you hit your stride, then you leverage your success, glide for a while, lose the energy and start to fade. I've seen it in my fellow artists and in big, commercial clients. Everything ebbs and flows. 

Maybe it's the best thing a conference could do; go out on a high note. Their timing was off...

the venerable music poster show...

Sixth Street gets shut off from car traffic every evening for the run of show.

Gypsy banks set up impromptu performances in the street. All fun but not lit well for 

great photos....

I think this shows a man giving up a DNA sample in order to enter the temple of National Defense contractors. At least that's how it seemed...

This is not the original Vulcan Gas Company. The namesake was over about a mile away on North Lamar Blvd. It's where I used to go to hear Janis Joplin, King Crimson and other fun acts play.

Always a struggle to come up with that $3 cover charge but at least the Lone Star beers was only fifty cents. Ah, the good old days.

tuesday's camera and operator.

Yes. Out of tens of thousands of attendees several had real cameras.

Congress Ave. is closed for the week from the Capitol to 6th St. 

Not much else to report. Swimming every day. Walking a couple miles in each direction to the SXSW event. Playing with different cameras and lenses every day. Watching the stock market shrink my savings on a daily basis. Hoping everything works out. 

It's going to get really, really interesting if the republicans cancel Medicare and Social Security. We'll still be okay here but a huge chunk of Americans will feel tremendous pain. Could happen. Hope it never does...

As Julie Andrews sang in "Mary Poppins": 

A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down. The medicine go down....

 

Roman Conversation. Square from film. Getting close with a medium format camera. This week we're mining from older posts. Lots of stuff there...

Watching the markets drop like a rock. Wondering if this is what my

fellow Americans thought they were signing up for....

Cue another giant wealth transfer.