Yeah. Now it's getting hot. So photographs of swimming are just the ticket. Dive in!!!

 

This is the Prince Rainier Memorial Swimming Pool in Monte Carlo. 

We did a corporate show in Monte Carlo for Tivoli Systems. I had most afternoons off 

so I made daily use of the pool for the better part of a week. 

Tip: Always pack a swim suit and goggles in your gear bag.

50 meters. Salt water. Bonus: it's right next to the bay so you 

get to watch all the big yachts come in to dock...

I swim but I also photograph. This is Tyler showing perfect backstroke form 

for an article about how (Olympian) Whitney Hedgepeth coaches backstroke 

for the UT Austin Masters Group. From the UT Swim Center.

Perfect freestyle form...

Ben tearing it up at Emma Long Park. He's brave. He'll swim anywhere there is water.

Valet/personal assistant/social secretary/mom in the background. Carrying all the stuff. 

Contax G2 with a 21mm Zeiss lens. 

Sarah. Post swim. 

For about ten years I was the "official" volunteer photographer for our swim club's summer swim program/team for the kids. "The Rollingwood Waves." I covered every swim meet and made photos to share with all the other parents. I never missed a swim meet with my kid, Ben, participating. 

The parents wrote the kid's events with a Sharpie on the kid's hands. Event # and heat #. That way the parents running the ready bench could tell which event a child was supposed to swim by a quick glance at their hands. The ink generally wore off by itself before the next meet. 

Saturday morning swim meets were a huge social event. With 200+ kids spanning 5 years old to 16 years old there were always groups of same age kids having fun, chilling out with Nintendos together and eating all kinds of brightly colored candy before their events. The parents were required to volunteer and keep the wheels turning. We counted three different gold medal Olympians as coaches during the ten years Ben swam on the Waves.  He did learn his four strokes very well. 

It's always social hour at the swim meets. 

Some kids make friends for life there.

Ben swimming breaststroke at a Saturday morning meet. 

Amazing what you can do with a long, manual focusing lens on a Kodak 

DCS-760 camera. If you anticipate the location and the phase of the stroke.

cheering on the team mates. 

A calmer pool at Balmorhea State Park out near Marfa, Texas.

A wonderful, cool, spring feed pool that's rarely crowded and open late. 

Swim to your heart's content. About a six hour drive from Austin.

Kirk's shoes at Balmorhea Pool. Circa 2010.

Ben coming off a wall at a night time meet. Sony RX10mk2.

He could have tucked those elbows in a little more for a better streamline...

Just sayin.

A swim meet at the country club where the pool is 50 yards from Lake Austin. 

Swim your event then jump off the pier. Unfettered fun for swimmer kids. 

Coach Ben in charge of the six and unders. His incorrigible dad embarrassing him 

by setting up a soft box and an 1800 watt battery-powered flash just to take yet 

another swim photo at the pool. Growing up surrounded by endless competitive swimming.

Is it any wonder that he's now a runner? Kidding a bit; he still swims.

It's Summer in Austin. Most other adults I know and hang out with are somehow connected to swimming. I start every morning with a pool full of them, swimming workouts written and coached by 

a professional coach. Or two. Or three. It's a cool way to start the day.

And, if you are coming home from a location shoot out in the heat it's even better to stop by the pool in the evening and plunge in. It rearranges your brain. And makes you happier.

Ambient temperature today? 98°. Water temp at the pool today? 79°. 

Heavenly.

Can a 50mm lens be.....too big?

Five years ago I bought a 50mm f1.4 S-Pro lens made by Panasonic. On the bottom side of the lens (when mounted on the camera) it claimed to be "Leica Certified." That 50mm was the biggest, heaviest and least fun lens to carry around that I could imagine. My memory of it is that it outweighed Leica's own gargantuan 24-90mm zoom lens for the L mount cameras --- and that lens is legendary for its bulk and weight. 

The Panasonic 50mm f1.4 was, at the time, the best "standard" or "normal" lens I had ever used. When one put it on a tripod and paid attention to technique the lens delivered an amazing performance. But in less than a year I sold it and never looked back. Mostly because I came to realize that the price/performance/handling equation was fatally flawed for most users. Myself included. 

 When I tried to use the Pana 50 monster for street photography it was perhaps the least discreet prime lens I had ever used. Less subtle than an 85mm f1.4. Less visually unassuming, almost, than a typical 70-200mm f4.0 zoom. And it dwarfed even the full size SL bodies and Panasonic S1R bodies on which I tried to use it. Made those cameras part of a package that was on the outside of the curve of happy use.

So even though it was the most amazing optical performer I'd ever come across it pushed me to look for much, much smaller options. And it helped me realize that once I stopped down just about any 50mm lens to f4.0 or f5.6 any visual differences were truly masked by expediency of actual use and/or the fact that great 50mm lenses aren't always just about micro contrast or edge performance. In fact, the first lens I bought after selling the Panasonic was a Voigtlander 50mm APO for around half the new price of the former. It is about 1/5th the size of the Panasonic. But even wide open, at least in handheld camera photography, it is competitive. Stopped down to f2.8 or f4.0 there's no discernible difference for most users. Myself included.

And I bought the Voigtlander 50mm to use on a Leica SL type camera even though that lens is made for native use on an M series rangefinder camera. The reason? Because it delivered high quality images while making the SL2 camera seem almost agile. It lowered the weight of the whole package by a lot. The camera and lens didn't strain at the strap. It was a nice package. It's still a nice package.

Since those experiences with the Panasonic 50mm f1.4 I've shied away from buying "ultimate" performance lenses or lenses that are tweaked without compromise for optical performance over handling. I own Panasonic's wonderfully cheap and lightweight 50mm f1.8 and I find it to be a great lens. Especially so since it's nearly always available new in the US for under $400. It's a delight because it's mostly made of high quality plastics so it weighs next to nothing (comparatively speaking). It's the handling that makes it worthwhile but it's no slouch at making great images...

I also picked up a Carl Zeiss 50mm f2.0 Planar for the M mount and I use it occasionally on the bigger cameras for the same reasons as the VM Voigtlander. Small, light but effective. The Zeiss and the Voigtlander lenses each have their own looks. Both are delightfully uncomplicated and robust. I bought the Zeiss used for around $500 and if it gets damaged from accidents or overwhelming user error I would be less sad than if a similar fate fell to a $2200 Panasonic 50mm f1.4. So much needless cost.

There has been a trend among companies that make lenses to build no hold barred, optical masterpieces without regard really for price, size or weight. The trend might have started with the original Zeiss 50mm Otus f1.4 from Zeiss. It was huge, dense, massive and priced outrageously. Then came the Sigma 50mm f1.4 Art lens. Slow to focus but super sharp and contrasty and equipped with a complex optical formula that perhaps goaded other brands to start responding in kind. I owned the original Sigma 50mm f1.4 Art series lens for the L mount system and while its optical performance was something to write home about it's focusing performance was horrible and, again, it weighed down a camera bag like an anchor. 

Now it seems that everyone's high speed 50mm lenses are endurance tests in a lens mount for photographers who have to carry gear all day. Is the trade off of high performance enough to justify high prices and possible hernias? That's something every photographer must decide for themselves but if I was about to walk through a large city to take photos for 10-12 hours a day, weeks at a time, I know I'd rather have a most humble, old Canon 50mm f1.8 FD manual focusing lens on an adapter than an Otus or an Art. But only if those were the only choices. 

My first grab for a lens on the mirrorless SL cameras is the Voigtlander APO, followed by the 50mm M Zeiss, followed by a 50mm Zeiss Planar f1.4 ZF (manual Nikon F version) on an adapter, or the Canon 50mm f1.4 FD also on an adapter, or the smaller, cheaper, lighter Panasonic 50mm f1.8. You can keep the big ones. I don't see enough difference to put up with the overkill lens design philosophy. It just doesn't work for me. 

Yes. A lens can be too big. And too big will slow you down, tire you out and make for a miserable shooting experience. Unless you can relegate it to tripod use but.....really....a fast 50mm stuck on a tripod? Just doesn't make much sense. 

Caught out in the rain with my camera. Not a problem. Jo's Coffee to the rescue.

Coffee in focus and taco out of focus.

New café at the downtown library.

It was "Austin Summer Hot and Sticky" when I left the house this afternoon around 2 pm to go and take some random photographs on South Congress Ave. A sweaty Father's Day walk with that new 75mm f2.0 lens I picked up a week or so ago. As I walked north on South Congress I was already starting to perspire. By the time I got to Jo's I was hot. 

I ran into my friend, David, there and we chatted while live country dance music played in the background and people with lots of tattoos drove by the front of the coffee stand on loud motorcycles. All of a sudden the sun dimmed, gray clouds rolled in accompanied by stronger and stronger wind gusts. The sky to the north turned dark gray. Zone 2 or 3. Seconds later the rain got into the act and for the next half hour we had an amazing storm complete with near horizontal rain and wind that dispersed the rain under all the sheltering roofs and soaked the assembled crowd with mist. 

The band unplugged their electrical instruments and amplifiers and rushed to get their gear out of the downpour. I instinctively covered my camera and lens with my hat --- just to minimize droplet fear. 

And then, an inch of rain to our credit and twenty degrees cooler temperatures  with it, the rain stopped and the winds died down. Of course David and I were shooting photos with water resistant cameras but old habits die hard and my gut reaction to rain on cameras is always to cover them up. Especially if I'm just out having fun and a client isn't there as a rationalization to power through a storm no matter what. 

After the atmosphere settled down I headed home to play with photos and then clean up and get ready for a Father's Day dinner with B&B at a new (to us) restaurant over in Central Austin. We have high hopes....

So pre-rain and post rain images below. Click on them to make them bigger. 

Rain drops in the pool at the San José Motel.

A MacBeth color chart painted on a wall for the convenience of photographers

and cinematographers in the area. Gotta nail that white balance. Right?

And then? Back home.  

Going through the files. Thinning out the archival preponderance of endless photographic stuff that most likely would never see the light of day again....

It's always interesting to see just how many photographs one has taken over the course of both a business career coupled with having the same pursuit as a passionate hobby. We're well passed the million photo mark over here. In fact, just in Blogger's attached galleries for this blog site we've got stored away 36,363 images. We've used most of them over the course of the last 16 years to populate the visual component of the Visual Science Lab. There are about 700,000 more files sitting in various galleries on Smugmug. And on 30+ different hard drives (migrating constantly) we've logged another 1.1 million images. And none of this counts the black and white and color negatives, as well as the various format transparencies that exist as film. That's a lot of stuff to store and keep track of and the sad or emotionally debilitating aspect of this mass collection of work is the fact that only the barest fraction of it will get re-seen, re-purposed or re-used. It just won't. 

So, year by year I resolve to winnow out everything I won't mess with ever again or even look at ever again. The easiest way is to go for the low hanging fruit. If we shot headshots for a tech company 20 years ago and that company has either gone away or shuttered it makes no sense at all to keep thousands of files of people who are now 20 years older (if they are still with us...) on my hard drives and in the cloud. It's a clean sweep. Everything in those folders gets trashed. Same with client files that aren't very creative and which were done 20 years ago. And in my personal work if I didn't enjoy a photo shoot I'm dumping all the original files as well as all the finished files. If I didn't like something the first time around chances are I'm not going to like it after the passage of time. If I was to ever get around to looking at the work in that category. Into the void it goes.

Some work gets a pass and will be around (hopefully) until such a time as I am no longer functional and the big dumpster comes to clear everything out of the office. These include most of the work I did on film, all the family photographs. All the beautiful photos of beautiful girlfriends. All the vacation photographs. All my favorite models' photos. And the photos of eccentric trips to places like Rome or St. Petersburg. And these already make up quite a big stack, metaphorically speaking. 

I'm getting to the same point with cameras. For some reason I keep buying extra copies of my favorite Leicas but now I don't have any compelling reason to sell off the older ones I purchased four or five years ago. I like having a bunch of spares around but it's totally illogical. Someday I'll figure out how to let go of most of them but right now there's no pressing motivation to do so. I'm good at getting rid of lighting gear and studio support gear but less able part with cameras and lenses. There's gotta be a good therapist out there somewhere...

I photographed the model above as a test. I had just read Leonardo da Vinci's daybooks and loved the idea of huge, top mounted diffusion between a model and the light source. So I tried to replicate the look in the studio. I think the experiment might have worked better in color. But it is a very different look for me. 

Staying cool and finishing up post processing on projects today. Mostly for friends and family. Shying away from accepting new work stuff that will lock in my schedule too far in the future. I'm booked for the 1st of July for surgery on that pesky skin cancer on my left cheek. I've been through this before and I'm pretty sure I'll be more or less useless for the first couple of days, post surgery. Not because of anything physical but from the emotional stress caused by the idea of surgery. Then it will be at least ten days out until I can get back in the pool. And then there is the healing after removal of stitches. So, basically, half of July is shot to hell. It seems obvious to me that there are many long walks in my future as well as much Netflix and Apple TV binging in my near future. That and learning how to effect food deliveries to the house....  Maybe I should take up golf. Or, God Forbid, pool.

Speaking of food, B&B took me to a restaurant called, "Carve" for Father's Day yesterday. It was a very large space and, given the holiday, it was filled to capacity at 7 pm. It was loud as only restaurants on holidays and special occasions can be. Lots of small children. Amateur restauranting at its finest. 

But the restaurant amazed me. They handled so many parties and, at least in our experience, never dropped the ball. And, finally, I have found a restaurant that does flaming desserts, flamed and finished table side. So much fun. Hello Cherries Jubilee! I can hardly wait to go back on a quiet Tuesday evening and see how much more aurally calm Carve will be then. But it's a comfortable spot. Not snotty or pretentious. Geared to the middle class. Something we find comfortable. 

A fun and happy Father's Day celebrated at the end by a viewing of the movie, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" which is in fact a sweet and endearing look at the last days of Life Magazine through the movie magic of Ben Stiller. It's an amazing movie that gets better with every viewing. Ah.

Monochrome all around us. My Leica "Monochrom" camera. It's really "dual use" capable.

 

Enchanted Rock State Wildlife Area.

Fourteen miles outside of Fredericksburg, Texas.

I'm not a big fan of black and white landscape photographs ---- for the most part. There are too many shortcuts in most image processing for the genre. I nearly always see increased contrast, "amplified" sky tonalities and very high sharpness as part of the mix. But sometimes it's fun to play with files on has shot in color, in raw, just to see what they might bring to the table as black and white images. 

When I went to Enchanted Rock to hike and photograph on Wednesday last week I knew I wanted to start with color raw files no matter which direction I might finally go in. There is just so much more potential to play with the files than when one shoots solely with a monochrome camera or when using monochrome file settings in combination with Jpegs. 

There was no question that the files would end up being very sharp and noise free. After all, I was shooting in Texas daylight which meant I could keep my chosen camera for the day at its lowest ISO (200) and I could use one of my sharpest and best corrected lenses for the M cameras; the Voigtlander 50mm f2.0 APO. For the majority of my photos I used f8.0 and a shutter speed of either 1/500th or 1/1,000th of a second. Not likely to be affected by user inflicted vibrations and nothing within the frames was moving.

While the lens is extremely sharp the sensor in the camera is reputed to use a very thin filter stack which translates again into even more resolution and sharpness. Very much a win, win.

When it comes to monochrome landscape shots the nature of the sky is important to the overall look. An overcast sky with no differentiating details usually looks dead in landscapes. But worst of all are the bald, white skies one sometimes gets. I felt lucky that a storm had moved through hours earlier and the sky was constantly changing which gave me a range of looks. The third and fourth frames were done early in the day when more rain was threatening. The top two images were done later in the morning as the skies started to clear. 

All the files were processing in Adobe Lightroom using a simple conversion to black and white. These may be your cup of tea but they may not and that's okay. I don't profess to being a master landscape shooter nor a post production genius. I just had fun shooting the images and playing around with them in post.