I have a strategy for camera and lens buying during the holidays. Wait.

Author. Waiting on pins and needles for the big, post-Christmas, used camera sales.

Past time to upgrade from that Olympus EP-2 (but keeping the finder....).

It's a feeding frenzy out in the wilds of the internet. And it even spills over to the bricks-n-mortar retailers. Whatever sales were planned by the big camera companies I think they happened in late November. Now it's impossible to get the cool stuff anywhere and the prices are back up in the no discount range if you can source what you want. The really "cool" stuff is going for a 50% surcharge on EBay. No guarantee it will ever arrive....

What I have noticed in just about every previous year is that February is the best time to buy gear. Inventories have largely caught up to demand, most people have come to grips with the fact that holiday spending of all kinds has ravaged their budgets and traffic for commerce plummets. The people who plan ahead are, by February, already looking into the future with dread about paying taxes in April. 

The silver lining exists a couple of months down the road in February. And it's all about lightly used "pre-owned" gear.  Everyone lucky enough to be wealthy snapped up whatever new gear they wanted and traded in or sold their "old" stuff during the holidays. Those with enough credit left on their various cards did pretty much the same thing in the weeks leading up to the year's end, rewarding themselves for who knows what. 

February is when the "New Arrivals" flow into the used categories of my favorite stores. All those folks who really, really wanted a new Leica SL3 or Q3 dumped perfectly good, low mileage SLs, SL2-S, SL2 and Q2 cameras with reckless abandon. You can pick up a good condition SL2 right now for around $2500-$3000 (last new retail price? Around $6k) but I'm betting you'll not only have a better selection but will also save about $500 more by waiting a couple months. Same with Q2s. And remember, two years ago those Q2s were the holy grail of compact cameras and waiting lists were the norm. That camera is still great but in Feb. 2025 you might see a 30-40% reduction from their last list price....and a smile-inspiring drop in used Q2 prices as well.

I'm pretty sure it's the same for Nikon, Canon and Sony users.

Yesterday I got a notice from B&H that Leica D-Lux8 compact cameras were now back in stock. I went back to check this morning and whatever they got in yesterday is gone today. As is nearly every Canon compact camera currently being made. As are the little Ricoh's and the TikTok-powered Fuji X100V1s. But when supply catches up with demand I'm pretty sure all of the "older" cameras (last year's precious commodities?) will be available used but in almost un-used condition in time for you to get something really nice for yourself by Valentine's Day. Skip the box of chocolates and the lingerie and pick up a heart-throbbing camera or lens (or both) instead. But keep your powder dry coming into the end of the year. Can't wait to pick up a Leica 75mm APO SL lens for half price. "Desperately needed...."

Obsolete Mannequin Technology.

Praying for that perfect, used APO something!

 

Not Sisters. Amy and Renae. Photographed in our little studio in Westlake Hills.

©Kirk 1998

Sisters. Photographed in the old studio on San Marcos St. In traditional wardrobe.

 

©Kirk 1995

hanging out over on South Congress Ave. Having fun just people watching and detail snapping. A calm and relaxed walking adventure.

The Pool at the San José Motel. The steps...

It's the 8th of December. Christmas is just around the corner. I have just one job left to complete before I put the "closed for vacation" sign up on the door (metaphorically). I know a lot of people get stressed during the holiday season. Some are overbooked and, even worse, sometimes overbooked with family that brings its own level of stress. Some are running out to time to work a full forty hours, deal with kids, and still have time to shop for gifts. Gifts that may run up some credit card debt that might linger for months... Forget leisure time, exercise, healthy food and the pursuit of hobbies. 

I categorically refuse to participate in the stressful parts of the holidays. I'm happy to help out but you won't find me volunteering to organize the swim team party, bake a cake to take to a dinner party, or assemble bikes and complex toys for anyone's kids. Nor will I willingly go to the NPR singalong at the state capitol, or drink spiked apple cider or it's sinister companion -- eggnog. I won't decorate gingerbread houses and I no longer am able to visit my parents or grandparents because they have all passed away. 

And, since all my neighbors have strung enough lights to blind airline pilots traveling at 30,000 feet, I don't feel at all compelled to drag my butt up onto the roof of my house and string endless strands of light in order to feel included. Or even more emphatically I won't copy two of my neighbors by hiring services that send crews of workers to wrap every tree, post, railing or edge of roof with yet more lights. I've already had to install black out curtains in my bedroom as a result of their holiday gusto! Seriously, if I need a reading light at night all I have to do is open my curtains and steal a couple hundred thousand watts of their X-mas cheer.

Nope. My plan it to get a nice gift for my spouse, drop some cash on my son and distribute very nice bottles of wine to my friends who deserve it. Except for the non-drinking friends, I'll have to figure that one out. But the basic idea is to celebrate by taking time off for quiet reflection --- which basically means long walks with cameras.

Today is a perfect template for the next 17 days. The swim practices on Sunday are an hour later than the ones during the week or on Saturdays. My crew was in our lane and swimming punctually at 9 a.m. Several members at the practice seem to have worn themselves out the night before at the UT football game. But we muddled through anyway. 

After a hearty breakfast I thought about what I wanted to shoot today and decided it would be fun to see what was happening over on the ever popular S. Congress Ave. strip. I sat for a few minutes in quiet meditation, waiting for the universe to inform me about which camera and which lens would be best for me today. Surprisingly it was a camera I somewhat slighted in a blog post yesterday. The SL2. Seemed the universe was looking to redeem that camera's reputation. I attached the Sigma 45mm lens since I mentioned the mania for 40mm lenses several times in the same article. That's it. A high resolution camera and a smaller, more agile lens. Ready to go.

The walk seems to be the important part of the outing but I did have fun running into an old friend who has been out taking photos in Austin for at least the last three decades. He was having coffee outside at Jo's with three other photographer friends. One of them recognized me from a daylong cinema lighting workshop I used to give in support of a filmmaker's filmmaking classes. He reminded me of a fun demo we used to do. We'd get chunks of big, broken mirrors, put them in huge darkroom trays, shine a gelled light at an angle to the tray so that the light from the mirrors reflected on a wall about 45° to the other side of the tray. Then we'd jiggle the tray so the reflections would wiggle, dance and mimic moving water. It was always a popular thing to do with a lighting class, the students of which were just learning how many possibilities there are with light. Those were cinema workshops we did nearly 30 years ago!

I wanted to photograph more people out on the street today but to be honest most of them looked boring to me. Most were of the same general demographic. Most were overweight. Most were dressed in generic clothes. And, as I am as shallow and judgmental as they come, few opportunities gelled or had the potential to gel. So I took another path. Signage, ornaments, scenes and stuff. Most of the images will get tossed as soon as I finish posting this but that doesn't minimize for me the value of the walk. The exercise of seeing. The practice with the camera or, even as indulgent, a sort of reaffirming of the value to me of the Leica SL2. 

Some bloggers can't see the difference between cameras, or cameras and lenses. It always seems very, very obvious to me. I would suggest that having spent a lot of time shooting very few images but thinking ab out them too much is a less practical way to learn to see photographically than to spend even more time shooting a zillion images and a practice ranging across dozens of cameras because when the data sample gets big enough the differentiating characteristics and patterns of camera file personalities becomes clearer and clearer. More and more defined. Like everything else observation of differences takes time and work. Not just time.

The 45m Sigma lens is one of my favorites. Until recently I owned two of them but after a certain point I realized that the duplication was a bit silly and so sold the second copy. The one I kept has more wear marks, more miles, and to me that makes it more fun, more valuable. Since, as I stated above, I think the mileage in the process trumps the time spent not shooting much at all. 

All photo walks start out with a warm-up session during which your brain, your hands and you eyes all get integrated and start working in concert. I like to look for scenes with color or shapes, or shapes and colors. I shoot a lot knowing that I can delete mountains of images after I give them a quick look through. Very little needs to be archived. More needs to be thrown away.

After several hours of watching, walking shooting and talking with people I knew or was meeting for the first time (the owner of the Citroen for example) I realized there was left over spaghetti with meat sauce in a container, in the refrigerator at home, just waiting for some lucky soul to warm it up in the microwave and feast on it. I decided to rush home and beat the crowds. It was good. Really good. As much fun to eat as the SL2 was to shoot. You know....it's really a darn good camera. And fun to shoot with. More like that. 

The Stetson classic, Open Road hat always beckons to me to buy. The same as the Ricoh GRIIIx used to. But I'm almost certain that if I drop $285 on a hat I'll discover when meeting younger and blatantly honest friends, that I look dorky in the hat and wasted the money I could have spent on them....

Still. The do look pretty cool.

Imagine how disappointed I was when I discovered that these cakes are fake. Just fake.

A permanent ornamental feature at Home Slice Pizza.

Take your holiday season nice and slow. It's not a contest. 

Why is it that I think I want a Ricoh GRIIIx but just can't bring myself to hit the "add to cart" button? It's not the cost rather it's the belief that I already have something much better in the category.

bulked up for serious art shooting.

The influencers influenced me. Of course I let them do it because I wasn't quick enough turning off YouTube. But it seemed like the influencers had a point. If I just bought a Ricoh GRIIIx with the sexy 40mm equivalent lens on the front I'd have the ultimate in a stealthy, concealable, all day carry-able, easy to use-able, Leica M killing photographic machine. Full stop. All glory to street photography!!!!

I've read all the reviews. Even the ones in Mandarin. I thought about which trousers might be a most appropriate nest for this most pocketable of cameras. I dreamed about lightening my gear load. Dreamed about walking through a big city for a full day with nothing weighing me down. How could I go wrong?

Then I played with one. It's a squirrelly little dude. Kinda like holding onto a bar of slippery soap. And I shot some test shots. And I watched as the battery drained in front of my eyes. And I squinted at the rear screen and every minute of my test run I wished the camera did this or that a lot better than it does. 

Someone finally sent me a big payment last week and I was, for the moment, flush with what I would call, "transitory cash." Which, it plainly says, is cash that's on the move. Either to pay for something real or to squander yet again on photo crap. But with cash at the ready I casually, slyly, almost as though on a whim, cruised to the B&H website to see about actually buying one of the most popular compact cameras on all of TikTok. Second only to the endangered species called the Fuji X100V8 or X100VI or whatever. Doesn't matter what you call the faux rangefinder Fuji because you can only get them by trading a kidney on Ebay. And even then you might not get what you asked for. Almost certainly not.

When I arrived at the B&H website I was crestfallen to find that all the variants of the GR111 were back-ordered and out of stock. So I bought some of Charles Manson's Elon Musk's crypto currency instead and called it a day. When I dropped back by B&H this evening, days after my first visit in search of GRs several of the models were back in stock but try as I might I couldn't work up the necessary enthusiasm required to go through with the usual reckless buying transaction. 

Why? I blame the camera I'm showcasing here. Now. It's the original Sigma fp and it's not much bigger than the GRIII. Well it is bigger where it counts --- in several places. First of all it has a bigger, juicier, full frame sensor. Not just a full frame sensor but a back side illuminated (BSI), 24 megapixel sensor. The second place where it is positively engorged by comparison is in the size of the battery. It's not a great battery but it sure is bigger than the skinny sliver of a battery in the GRs. 

It handles the same as the GRIII cameras in that one looks at a rear screen to compose and shoot. And it's small. But to be fair it's not quite small enough that one's Levis are going to swallow up the camera in one of the pockets.... But you can always store an extra SD card in the watch pocket! 

Left in a barebones configuration the Sigma is small and unobtrusive. But the fact that it can be configured for lots of different (and professional) uses is a huge plus. Here's the secret to my preference for the Sigma over the TikToker photo favorite ---- the fp has the ability to use all L mount lenses and since it has an L lens mount you can also, with adapters, use all of your Leica, Voitlander and Zeiss lenses on the camera. If you want flexibility with the GR111 cameras, with their fixed lenses, you'll need two. One for wide angle vistas and one for normal photography. That can be a lot to juggle. And two takes up prodigious pocket space.

With the Sigma you can go from an ultra wide angle lens to an extreme telephoto lens and everything in between. Pretty much everything fits. I've even had old Nikon F lenses on the front of the little machine. With the GRs you choose on nearly normal focal length or one ubiquitous semi-wide angle focal length and that's it. For all time. No matter how much your tastes or travels change.

I can tell you right now that the Sigma is a much more rugged camera. And it has a big heat sink on the back, under the screen, so you can keep shooting with it even as you are personally succumbing to heat exhaustion under a glowering sun.

I like using the fp with the Sigma 45mm f2.8. They seem made for each other. But some will shame you in 2024-2025 if you aren't zeroed right in at 40mm. Not to be sidelined I found a 40mm f1.4 Voigtlander lens (VM) in the drawer and an adapter to mount the lens on any L mount camera. Voila. Now I have a 40mm on my fp camera and it's two full stops faster than the lens on the GR. Trade-off? yeah. You get to manually focus it. 

If you are intent on shooting video with either camera you'll find the fp much better spec'd out and you have the option of outputting raw video files via the micro-HDMI port to an Atomos Ninja monitor/recorder. Win, win, win. In desperate need of an EVF on your camera of choice? No go on the GR. Yes go on the fp. It's kludgy but it works and the image in the finder is really good.

The fp is also exceedingly weather resistant, and smackdown resistant. And if you are a contrarian you'll find far fewer fellow influencees running around doing street photography with the fp than with one of the various GRs. I guess it's all of this and a bit more that keeps me from rushing out and buying yet another little plastic compact camera. That, and the realization that I already spent the transitory cash.

Save yourself while there's time. The influencers are coming for you.

slimmed down for a walkable package with a nice grip.

for those times when you need pure, raw video and you wanna use that big Leica glass.

naked trim.

contextual appraisal of actual size.

of course you can use it with Leica and Zeiss M series glass.

in its most pure form.

weird grips and weirder lenses abound.

this camera made me guilty of using the dirty baby diaper hold. 

considering adapting bright line finders in lieu of the big loupe.

Everyone talks a big game about good, ole Kodachrome but do they have the balls

to toss out five garbage cans full of old, useless K-chrome slides? And, if they only shot a few 

hundred rolls do they even really know squat about the famous slide film? Call me back when you've

shot your first 10K rolls of K-64. And your first thousand rolls of K-chrome 200. Or your first 

3K rolls of medium format K-chrome. Remember that? 

Tell me again why people are regurgitating the history of K-Chrome once again.

Can't we let it die with dignity? It's not coming back.