B. before he could even swim....

 

A favorite. B. The best person I can think of with whom to retire.

At Sweetish Hill Restaurant in the mid-1980s.

Olympus Pen FT half frame camera. 40mm f1.4 Pen lens.

 

Guest Post by Henry White. What the heck is Kirk up to?

Another random photo of a very nice person...

 It's kind of weird. One minute KT is here pounding out post after post and the next minute he's M.I.A. I walked through the ten inch steel blast doors into the entry area for the Visual Science Lab headquarters and everything was dark. Except, of course, for the 30 foot wall of blinking front panels for the servers and the status lights on the plutonium powered, uninterruptible back-up power units. I turned off the layers of intruder alarms and went into the break room to fetch coffee. Usually by this time in the morning my boss has been in for hours, reeking of chlorine and sunscreen, and the coffee machine is always humming. Today? No such luck. The custom brewing mechanism was stone cold; untouched. The air conditioning still set at 50 degrees...

I started the coffee machine humming and walked over to KT's office door, did the retinal scan, the fingerprint scan and the voice scan, and entered the thirty digit code to get through the door. I looked carefully around on the floor to make sure I hadn't inadvertently triggered the automatic release on the black mamba cages by doing the alarm disarming out of sequence... Nope. I got it right and I'm still here to talk about it. 

No notes on the desk. No messages on the whiteboard that hangs on the wall. No text messages either. 

Perplexed I walked over to the underground garage to see if I could use my "Sherlock Holmes" brain to discover anything. While the Veyron, the McLarens and the Bentleys were all accounted for the Subaru was missing. Road trip? Always possible. I checked outside on the crash pad but there was nothing new, just the continuing car fire from the exploded lithium batteries on that EV we were considering...

I walked over to my much smaller office and settled in to see how the markets were opening everywhere when I finally got a message on my proprietary iWatch; the one Tim had made for our team as a "Thank You." It was a terse message. Brief. Not wordy. Almost sketchy. 

It said: "retired. out shooting portraits. sell the cameras and the lights when you get into the office. Give yourself a bonus. Ghost write a blog post for me. don't sell the three original SL cameras. They are special. No company will ever make that good a camera ever again. Also, have the mechanic check the O2 mixture on the Veyron, it hesitated a bit last night when I hit 165. That is all. Soldier on." 

I didn't know what to make of it. Usually his instructions are more detailed, more authoritative. 

But since I have been handed a project, here goes: 

Gosh. This is harder than it seems... daily inspiration? Almost inconceivable.

"FACTS ABOUT THE WORLD'S GREATEST CAMERA" 

It's not widely known outside of closely held circles but earlier this year a German company brought to market the world's greatest camera...ever. It's called the ....... wait! I'm getting an encrypted call on the KT dedicated burner phone. Ooops. I'm not allowed to divulge the new product just now. Yikes! That was a close call.

Update: A sigh of relief. While I was sitting in the titanium and kevlar lined conference room of the VSL HQ I finally heard from the boss. Seems I missed the recent blog post in which he more or less announced his retirement from commercial photography work. He swam early this morning, had Chip fire up the back-up Gulfstream (an older 5 series) and met an old friend for coffee at an undisclosed location about 760 miles from here. He should be back to write about his adventures sometime tomorrow; Sunday at the latest. 

An added note from him: "Move 100 million into Swiss Canton bonds. Stock in some more of that wonderful Parisienne Sourdough bread." 

Followed by: "Success! we've now cornered the market on Leica SL cameras. The 2015 era model. You may now announce that it is, without a doubt, the best consumer camera ever made. Make room in the warehouse for another shipment. And order another one of those darling DLUX8s." 

I did some more busy work. Archived some files. Tossed out several tons of transparencies and negatives that KT went through last week...and found wanting. Carefully polished the front and rear elements of a couple of those lenses we bought from the NSA GeoSpatial division (remounted for the SLs), and called it a day. 

Running a commercial photo business can be complex and daunting. On the other hand, why would anyone who had a choice pursue anything else? Baffling....

Now heading back home to prompt my favorite LLM app to write a series of detective novels. Easy pickings. Most of the content is already pre-scraped. 

Gold watch? Or just another camera?

 

I've made a conscious effort this year to reject all the work I no longer want to do and to say "goodbye" to clients who are less than big fun with which to work. This past week I finally hit an inflection point and started turning every "work opportunity" down. On Monday I finished the post production on the last commercial obligation I had in progress. I have added no new jobs to the calendar and have, instead, been lining up trips to fun locations. Next week I'll be in Chicago and in late October I'll be spending at least a week in Montreal (my all time favorite city in all of north America). 

It was scary to stop working for clients. Note that I said, "for clients" as I want to make the distinction that I won't stop taking photographs or undertaking challenging projects, but I won't be doing any more projects that have as their impetus commercial success. It's scary because for the first 30 or so years of being an "adult" and being the owner of my own business my attention to work, details, billing and investing was crucial to provide for my family. To buy houses, pay for the kid's college, save for retirement, pay taxes and buy food. 

A number of years ago I hit a point, financially, at which I could retire but was too anxious about the future to do so. Now I have no reservations about discontinuing the money making part of my life and concentrating on doing stuff either because it's the right thing to do or because it's fun. 

I have shifted gears, mentally. It took a lot of time but I think I've finally learned to be comfortable flipping the switch from saving money to spending money that I've saved. It's a harder lesson to learn than one might think. Many people with a higher than average net worth actually have difficulty spending in retirement and often leave this world with far more money at the end of retirement than they had at the beginning. Hence the popularity of books like Die With Zero. 

The goal of many people is to retire while they are still physically fit enough to enjoy themselves. To take trips that involve walking and other forms of mobility. But sadly a huge percentage of people over 60 arrive at retirement with one or two (or more) long term health issues. And a list of pharmaceutical prescriptions. Problems with joints. Problems with blood sugar. Problems walking or standing. And far less energy than they thought they'd have when they were young and chained to a desk.

One of the fortunate things about owning one's own business and having a commitment to a particular sport is that one's odds of hitting retirement with knees, hips and lower back fully functional and pain free are better than average. I've been a life long competitive swimmer and unless I was out of town on business it was rare for me to miss a day of masters swimming. If we had jobs with early start times I tended to adjust and go to earlier practices. For a while, during the first year of the Covid epidemic I was hitting the pool at 6 in the morning. There is even a masters practice here in Austin, at another club, which starts at 5:30 a.m. and I've hit that practice from time to time when a schedule conflict arose. 

I'm heading into my 70s (a little over a month away) weighing about five pounds more than I did when I was in college ( Or, At University, for our UK readers.... but I always want to ask: which university???) and with the same blood pressure, energy and daily discipline as well. My energy levels don't seem to have fallen and my mental acuity seems intact (critics might say the jury is still out...). As many coaches and swimmers have said: Swimming is the Fountain of Youth.

But more than that staying healthy and feeling young is undoubtedly a state of mind. A point of view. A philosophy of intention. 

Resigning, "Acting your age", taking it easy, deserving a rest, and all the rest of the bad platitudes and advice about how to "gracefully" give up are incredibly ageist and self-debilitating. Sure, you can give up, pad around the house in slippers and sip Sanka but it's a trap and an ever shrinking cycle of defeat.

I prefer to think of "retirement" as being the next stage of potential accomplishment. Fewer distractions. More resources. And a life time of training. 

Here we go.

A favorite post from 2018. A busy and pivotal year for me. What is Happiness?

 https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2018/10/how-to-be-mostly-happy-photographer.html

Backtracking a bit and reading Sally Mann's autobiography: "Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs" Which was published in 2016 but oddly, overlooked by me.

 

Blogger in Paris. At the Eiffel Tower. 1978.

I have known of Sally Mann's work for decades now and always thought of her as a gifted photographic artist. The fact that she is a writer; and a damn good one, was never on my radar. Recently there have been announcements everywhere about her newest literary work called: "Art Work. On the Creative Life."

I suggested to my family, who are always asking what I would like for my birthday, Christmas, Groundhog Day, or flag day, that they could do worse than getting me the new Sally Mann book. But the birthday is a month away and being newly captivated by the idea of famous, contemporary photographer as literary ace, I decided I should do some homework while waiting for the upcoming volume. 

I sat down with her 2016 book, "Hold Still" just yesterday morning, after swim practice, and I've been swept in by not only her writing but also her amazingly dramatic and ultra-Bohemian existence. Now less that a quarter of the way through the book I am riveted and even when turning on a sprinkler in the garden I come rushing back into the house to take up where I left off with the book. 

If you don't like strong, smart, eccentric women you might not like this book... but for all of us normal, well-adjusted folk it's a treasure trove. And an interesting read.

Since it's peppered with photo references, photo stories and even ..... photographs I can't really label this post as "OT." Read the book, don't read the book, whatever. But I think, now at the quarter way mark, I can pronounce it great reading. 

Finishing up an assignment that may be my last commercial work of the year. Or the decade. Or...whatever.

Stephanie. Faculty at the Seminary.

I wrote recently about a client I did portraits for on what might have been the hottest day of the Summer. The thermometer hit 105° that afternoon with a heat index of over 110°.  During that hellaciously hot day I did portraits of seventeen people. No one was affected by the heat. No one sweated. No one's checks flushed bright red. And we got the work done with no lasting ill effects for the photographer. 

Here's how I proceeded: Based on outside portrait attempts for the same client in Summers past (beginning of the Fall semester and mostly roasting), we totally changed our approach last year. Instead of scouting multiple locations around the campus and then scheduling people to meet us outside and be photographed in the blistering heat I was able to schedule all seventeen people to come into a cozy and well air conditioned studio located in the campus library building. Coffee available just down the hall...Lunch delivered by the client.

The studio we used is fairly small but big enough in which to shoot portraits. The back wall is a white cyc. There is existing lighting on a set of ceiling grids/rails but I nearly always want to use my own lights. More control. More familiarity. 

I used LED lights from Nanlite. They are the Compac 100 series of light panels which are 16 by 24 inches, have good front diffusion built-in, and are fixed to be used in a vertical orientation. I used two of these at the front of the set up and put fabric grids on them to control light spill around the small, white walled space. One fixture was used as a main light from camera left and the other as a fill light from camera right. I added a third fixture with a slightly warmer light setting in the back, as a back light. I usually set backlights to be on the opposite side of my subjects from my main light. Seems to work better that way. 

The final light was a small panel, a LumiPad 25, also from Nanlite, used as a direct light onto the background to keep the illumination level commensurate with the front lighting.

The camera of choice for the portraits was the Leica SL2-S which I like for situations such as this where a 47 or 61 megapixel camera file is overkill and the fewer, 24 megapixels of this camera are more than adequate. I chose to use a TTArtisan 75mm f2.0 AF lens (for the L mount) because I didn't want to crop too tightly; I needed "air" around my subjects in order to have flexibility in compositing the portraits with exterior background images. I stayed right around f5.6 and 1/100th of second shutter speed, using ISO as needed. Raw files to start with...

We did the same kind of shooting for last year's images so I already had put together a catalog of pre-un-focused backgrounds from all over the campus. I was thinking about who I would composite into which background as I was photographing the people, trying to predict how each person would fit into a given background. 

Back in the office I took the images selected by the subjects, and approved by the marketing people, and did a bunch of color matching, retouching and all the usual things you might do with a portrait image, in Lightroom. Once I had the images retouched and enhanced the way I liked them I exported them to PhotoShop for a final bit of trickery and then separated each subject from their neutral background and dropped them into appropriate exterior backgrounds from around the school. There is nearly always some fine-tuning to be done. 

I use defringing in the layers menu to get rid of hard edge outlines where the images meet. I try to match color and contrast between subject and background without going overboard, and I try to remind myself that viewers of the website will be able to see many of these images side by side and so I took post production steps to try to homogenize the overall look for the sake of continuity. When I finally flatten the layers before saving I generally add a bit of noise to the overall file because I think it helps harmonize the foreground and background layers. 

I'm halfway through the composites right now and I'm aiming to finish everything up before the end of the day tomorrow. 

When we wrap up the project I'll bill them for my day of shooting, a set cost for each composite, miscellaneous post production costs and also a usage fee for a five year license to use the images on their website and also for public relations as it relates to the Seminary. 

I just thought you, the reader, needed a change of pace and I wanted to remind long term readers that  the whole reason the blog exists is to explore and share the real world, day-to-day machinations of a professional, freelance photographer. And yes! We still exist in 2025. 

Go Photography!!!