Portrait of Renae.

 This was originally shot on a medium format film camera. The original image was printed on a double weight photo paper which was then toned in selenium. The exif info for this file shows the originating camera as an Olympus digital but that was just the camera used to copy the print and translate it into a digital file. 

The image was lit with one large soft box using electronic flash. The edge print is not a digital construction but is the inner edge of the frame of the film holder which was filed down to allow a small margin of the film edge to show. 

Since I used a simple metal file and I'm not always precise the effect of the filing is that the holder has variations in dimensions and smoothness. The negative was also partially diffused for part of the print time under the enlarger which accounts for the soft edges and whatever ghosting you might see.  Each print made with my Pictrol(tm) diffuser is different; unique. The device was not mechanically attached to the enlarger but was hand held and moved during parts of the overall exposure. 

This is the style of portraiture that I have always liked best. 

Do you want a very well corrected, very fast, short telephoto lens for your medium format camera? Well then, don't get a TTArtisan 90mm f1.25. But......

I've been mucking around with full frame cameras for months now and, except for work, have been ignoring the GFX 50Sii that I bought mid-Summer. The camera is great. The sensor is great. The problem is with me. I just can't seem to pull the trigger and buy the lens I really should use with this system. That would be the 110mm f2.0. Rave reviews everywhere and at a full frame equivalent of 88mm it would seem to be the perfect choice for me. But for some unknown reason I'll continue to waste time and money looking for a "miraculous" low cost alternative while trying to convince myself that lens "X" or lens "Y" is just as good as the 110mm, if only I just put more elbow grease (and post processing) into the mix. 

The sad reality is that the Fuji GF 50mm lens and the 35-70mm kit lens are both really good performers; just not at the right focal lengths for me. So far I've mostly wasted money and time buying first the TTArtisan 90mm f1.25 lens and then the Mitakon 135mm f2.5. Both are available in both Hasselblad and Fuji medium format mounts. That would strongly imply that these lenses would be suitable for those camera systems. That they would cover the full frame of the MF sensor well. But....nope.

So, if perfect lens geometry is important be sure to pass on the 90mm. And, if zero vignetting is a must then consider both of these lenses as abject failures. Profound failures. I know this for sure now because I spent hours walking around yesterday photographing with the GFX 50Sii + 90mm, and another few hours staring at the resulting files in Lightroom and wondering just how much tolerance I really have for mostly crappy lenses versus just spending the money to buy the right stuff the first time. 

So, as pertains to the 90mm f1.25, what are my gripes? The universal black marks against this lens are threefold. First, it weighs a ton. Well, more like three pounds but that might as well be a ton if you are working a full day with this beast, handheld. Second, the vignetting is just awful. Amazingly bad. Stunningly bad. When I tried building a profile for this lens I found that +75 in the vignetting controls in Lightroom was just almost good enough. Really, +90 to +100 would be better. And here's the crappy deal with vignetting in a simply designed lens like this --- the amount of vignetting is variable and depends on the aperture setting and the distance setting. I guess that's true for a lot of lenses but this one goes from really dark but soft corners near wide open aperture settings to really dark but harder edged corner vignetting as you stop down. The final flaw is the easiest one to fix; mostly. It's the presence of a bunch of barrel distortion. You can correct most of it with a +7 or +8 increase in the distortion controls in post but you should also be aware that there are still mostly unfixable touches of "mustache" distortion that are not tamed by the magic of software corrections in most programs. 

One hopes that someone (Adobe or TTArtisan) will make a lens profile for this pudgy beast that actually fixes some of this stuff. But I think the market for the lens is so small that this will never happen. 

My next question, if I were a potential buyer, would be: "Are there any "pros" to this lens? Any conceivable reasons to buy and use one? 

Well, yes. 

Even wide open, at the center of the frame, the lens is very sharp. Stop it down to f5.6 and it's sharp everywhere. (But why would you carry around a three+ pound, ultra-fast lens if you need to shoot it at f5.6 to make it work? If you are shooting objects or scenes near infinity the lens works fine even at f2.0 and f2.8; except for the far corners. You'll still have to fix vignetting and distortion but in all fairness most lenses for current mirrorless cameras (Leica Q2 and Q3 included) lean heavily on in-camera software to make a lot of corrections to their lenses. A lot!!! The only difference, really, is that this particular 90mm is left to its own devices in use rather than being saved by intricate software fixes. If you had a "go-to" profile for this 90mm in your post processing program it might be a bit more popular. And perhaps more people would be walking around with bulging biceps from hand holding it all day long...

I keep the lens because I think it can be redeemed as a portrait lens. I've been using it to make controlled portraits with for a while and I actually have come to like it in these applications. I crop the images in camera to either the square or the 5:4 or 7:6 aspect ratios and the vignetting mostly goes away, along with a percentage of the frame. If you are a 3:2 fan you'll mostly remove the vignetted corners in that crop as well. The distortion correction of +7 works fine for all portrait work. A little, tiny bit of residual mustache distortion doesn't destroy portraits. 

It was a lovely afternoon here in Austin, Texas yesterday. Neither too warm nor too cool. Partially sunny but with fun clouds passing by. I took the lens out to see if I'd been blaming my own poor technique on the lens or if the lens was really as bad as I remembered. I shot a lot of frames. I walked a lot of steps. I took my time focusing and generally used the magnification feature to make sure things were really sharp. 

Here are some examples from the time spent with the lens. Please note that most of the frames have been mostly (but not completely) corrected for vignetting. The lens is fairly color neutral and I do like the center portion of most images shot with it. Just don't buy one for use as a precision architectural lens; especially if you intend to use it wide open. And copy work? Forget it. There are better options. Really. 

The one thing this lens is really good at is doing portraits with a wide open aperture and letting the background just vanish. That's its special feature. And that's probably why most people who buy one and keep one do so. It's a great look --- when it all works.

I'm in love with the Texas skies. When they behave as I'd like them to. 

I'm including this image because it's a great example of the center sharpness even when using the lens with the aperture at its maximum of f1.25. I focused on the center type and by the time I get to any corner it's just so out of focus. This was also shot at near the closest focusing distance. 

Fairly sharp at f4.0. Very usable.

this was shot long after the sun set and is a good example of a situation in which 

f1.25 can come in handy. The exposure was ISO 800, f1.25, SS= 1/13th. That's 

a pretty dark use case....

this was shot to show the bokeh of the lens at wide apertures. 

Notice the "cat's eye" bokeh in the corners. 

The sky changes so quickly just before the sun is gone over the horizon...

Holiday lighting at the Seaholm Power Plant. 

Same as every other year.

 

Elliott Erwitt, one of the last living legends of photography, passed away this week at 95 years of age. The end of an era.

 https://www.elliotterwitt.com/

https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/elliott-erwitt/

https://www.hrc.utexas.edu/press/releases/2016/elliott-erwitt-collection.html

(Will Van Overbeek and I spent a day with Elliott Erwitt in Austin, Texas while he was here to negotiate the donation of his archives to the HRC*. We were the local facilitators for his visit. We picked him up from the airport, delivered him to his hotel, took him to the HRC for meetings, took him to El Azteca Restaurant for lunch, Progress Coffee for an afternoon coffee, over to the LBJ Museum to look around, and finally delivered him to the Blanton Museum where he did an evening slide presentation for a packed house. 

He carried his rangefinder camera (with 50mm lens) everywhere. 

He was quiet but possessed of a very dry and very wonderful sense of humor. Will and I had a great time hosting him).

What an amazing career! May he rest in peace. 

*The Humanities Research Center at UT.  Aka: The Harry Ransom Center

A portrait of two sisters. In the old studio just east of downtown.

Sisters.

At one point in a previous career I was a creative director at an advertising agency here in Austin. Mousumi (on the left) was my print representative at a local printing company. She was the person who bid on our print projects and also shepherded them through the print process. I think she secretly delighted in arranging for our press checks to happen late in the evenings to punish us for, well, being advertising people (I kid). When our four color projects were on the press B. and I would get a call from the printer and we'd hustle over to the plant to do a "press check." To make sure all the color films were lined up in sync. To make sure the color matched our pantone selections and the color proofs. A complex press check could take hours and hours. 

After I left the agency I ran into Mousumi at an advertising happy hour and I asked if she would come by for a portrait session. This must have been four or five years after my last print job. She came over and posed for me and then, later, called to ask if I would take some photographs of her with her sister in traditional Indian outfits. Of course I agreed.

We shot mostly in medium format film and mostly in black and white but I also did a whole series of them together and individually in color, on 4x5 transparency film. A devilishly hard way to do portraits!

They came out well and I made prints for them. Mousumi and I still stay in touch now nearly 30 years later. 

Photography has always been such a fun adventure.

 

Portrait of a young woman.

 

Anonymous.

When we moved to our current home the first thing I did with the property was to add a studio building. It's not large and it's not fancy but it has been convenient and a good resource for making portraits that I like. When we finished construction it was 1997 and I was still photographing almost completely on film. I had several digital cameras but they were slow and the files were never a match for the image qualities I could get from a medium format frame of film. Especially with black and white.

At one point I'd shot with three medium format camera systems. The Rollei SL6008s, the Mamiya6 and, of course, a variety of Hasselblads. But in the end I always came back to the Hasselblads, especially for the kinds of portraits I liked to do in the studio. 

I met the subject of this image at Sweetish Hill Bakery and asked her if she would come to my studio and pose for a black and white portrait. She agreed. We spent half an hour making the photographs and a bit longer in conversation. I was never looking for a smile or a typical, "sexy" pose. I wanted something more authentic to the person. I think I got most of what I was looking for in the portrait. 

And then she was gone. 

I think the portrait is balanced and "clean" looking. Nothing extraneous. 

Again, this is a copy shot of a print. The digital copy was made with an iPhone.  Even so, the image holds up well for web use...

Goat and Man in South Austin. Early digital. Kodak DCS-760 and a 50mm lens. It all worked fine.

 I was doing a lot of work for the theater and we were shooting a bunch of different images around Austin to promote the theme: "Keep Austin Weird." The writer thought that keeping a pet goat in a residential neighborhood qualified as weird and so I went off to get the pair to agree to collaborate with me. The human agreed but I think the goat had some reservations. If his owner wasn't holding on to him tightly the goat had a consistent desire to rush over to me and butt me with his horns. Other than that he was right charming...

It was one of part of a seemingly endless assignment that mostly consisted of getting into the car, then out of the car, building a quick rapport for a half hour and then heading out to the next photo opportunity. My favorite subject was an electrical engineer who made an entire garden out of dolls and doll's heads. Since he was an electrical engineer he thought it would be super cool to put red LEDs in each of the doll's eyes. At night his "doll garden" looked pretty freaky. Like something out of a horror movie. Lots of sinister doll faces with glowing eyes, all staring, unblinking, at you. 

According to the story the engineer welcomed a new family who had moved in next door by turning all the dolls' heads toward the neighbor's house. Didn't take the neighbors long to get that privacy fence built between the properties. 

I find it amazing in retrospect that I was able to spend so much time having so much fun with photography while at the same time buying a big house, keeping the family fed and healthy, and saving up for the inevitable rainy day. Or retirement. Whichever comes first. I always thought I'd have to do something boring and soul crushing for work to make it into the "good life." Seems all one really needs to do is learn how to help other people have fun too. Who knew?

Fun all around today without even touching a camera. Swimming, weights at the gym,  lunch with a friend at Whole Foods, the shameless purchase of a pecan pie there as well. Pushing out some blog posts. Making sure the comments are flowing like fine wine and ordering just one more Nanlite LED fixture from B&H. When B. gets home from San Antonio we'll head out for some really good Chinese food. All good here. Wouldn't want to trade with anyone!

Location portrait somewhere in the mountains in the midwest. Could it have been Virginia? Does it matter?

man waiting patiently to get back into his warm winter coat.

 I'd been on the road for weeks. I was working on a project for an enormous infrastructure company. They build things like lakes, damns and long distance electrical delivery systems. They were finishing up a series of high voltage lines across some rural areas and they wanted portraits of the key people on the ground for one of the projects to use in an annual report and in subsequent marketing. It was the third week of November 2018. A Monday. Probably the 20th. 

I'd been covering the wildfires out near Sacramento the day before. I got a note that we were on for the photo shoot in the mountains of Virginia, far from any major airport. The in-house travel people at the client side arranged for a redeye flight back across the country to Charlotte, NC, booked a hotel for what turned out to be a four hour rest stop, and booked a rental car for me as well. The next morning, armed with a GPS pin on my phone and a target time to meet a bevy of workers in pick-up trucks at a lone truck stop hundreds of miles away, I tossed my two cases of gear into a black Toyota Camry and headed north. By this point in the project I'd been in and out of a dozen rental cars. The one from the day before, out in Sacramento, was a Chevrolet Impala. It was not my favorite. The Toyota was a decade ahead in terms of user satisfaction. 

Halfway there I cruised through a McDonalds, used their mostly clean restroom and also got an Egg McMuffin and a large coffee to consume while driving ever north. (Just checked. The destination was Bastian Virginia). Say what you will about McDonalds but if you are traveling rural and you are on a tight schedule finding one of Ronald McDonald's golden arches can be key to survival. 

There's not much to Bastian but there was a BP gas station and that was our meeting spot. I needed to be there by 12:30 pm and I made it by the skin of my teeth. But the journey wasn't over yet. I met about twelve people there. They were spread out into four or five pick-up trucks and I was to follow them up into the mountains where, a short while later, we left paved roads and followed a crumbling, one lane dirt road up the side of a very tricky mountain. A vehicle with four wheel drive would definitely have been much more appropriate. 

We reached an overview that we all liked and I re-read my instructions from the marketing department in the comfort of my car with the heater turned up. At six or seven thousand feet in late November it was downright cold. I got out of the car and assembled a couple of electronic flashes on small, light stands. The company people took turns holding the stands steady in an increasing wind as I photographed their co-workers, one by one. 

Before we'd fired the first frame a light sleet started to fall. It got progressively worse. I covered the flashes with Ziplock bags to protect them from the moisture. We kept shooting because no one wanted to come back later and try again. We were two thirds of the way through the cattle call of portraits when the person who was managing this part of the project on the ground told me we should hurry it up because "weather was moving in." And he strongly suggested that before weather got there in force I should get my low slung, consumer rental car off the top of the mountain and onto some paved highway. We redoubled our efforts.  We wrapped a little before three in the afternoon.

The sleet got worse and the temperatures continued to drop. By the time I'd tossed all the gear in the car I could barely feel my hands/fingers on the steering wheel. I waved farewell to the convoy that followed me down the mountain and headed back South. I needed to get to Raleigh and be ready for another shoot the next morning at 9 a.m. somewhere just South of Raleigh. And my hotel was four or five hours away. 

It's fun to shoot environmental portraits. More fun if you don't have to drive for hours in either direction and stand around in a sleet storm to do them. But that's fun and challenge of commercial work.

It's so much easier when it's all just for fun. You can look at the weather report and decide to stay inside, sip hot coffee and read a good book instead... and later you can write and tell me, definitively, how I should have handled the job...

Yep. Same Godox AD200 flashes I'm still using five years later. Good investment for lighting combined with lots of travel. Might have to buy one more. Nostalgia purchase.