Power Banks. Power at your disposal.

 I first discovered power banks (rechargeable lithium battery packs generally used to recharge phones, laptops and other devices when one is out and about with no access to wall plugs) way back in 2013 when I was beta testing a power-hungry camera from Samsung for a week or so in and around Berlin. The digital camera had a five inch screen on the back and it also ran a relatively power-hungry version of an Android operating system. Low battery indications were becoming frequent and frustrating and sometimes the camera would choose to shutdown just as I lined up an incredible shot in the EVF. At some point one of my minders from Samsung distributed small battery banks for everyone in our little pod of cameras testers. The USB-A banks were capable of recharging the camera batteries (in camera) for one or two resuscitations and that was enough to take the edge off the rapid depletion of juice. We also discovered that we could shoot and charge the cameras at the same time. Albeit slowly.  It was a big revelation in 2013...

In the Fall of 2020 I produced a three hour, online, live broadcast, fund-raising video show for a local theater.  I wanted the show to be a three camera set up and since the "talent" was competent for live theater but not for a live production I wanted the main, center camera set up with a large teleprompter. All three cameras ( Two Panasonic S1 cameras and one Panasonic S1H camera ) Were run into a digital video switcher so our editor could switch between the three camera views on the fly. The two talents were miked with lavaliere microphones and we could also cut away during the show to pre-recorded video performances to spice things up. To aid the flow.

When you are running three cameras in a live production it's pretty critical that all three cameras stay up and running for the duration. Sure, we could watch each camera closely and run over to change the internal camera batteries as needed but that's a "high anxiety" method of production and the chances of failure are high. We chose camera video codecs that would neither overheat nor overtax the cameras and which would not run into program time limitations. 1080p was the perfect choice. 

To make all three cameras run reliably for over three hours I made the decision to outfit each camera (positioned on tripods) with an Anker battery pack of its own. Each battery pack could deliver, through the USB port of the cameras, about 21,000 milliamperes of energy, or about ten times more power than a typical in camera battery. Since the cameras had been used before in video set-ups I was reasonably sure that we would have between six and eight hours of runtime --- if we needed it. At some point we decided to add Velcro to both the battery and a leg of each tripod so the power banks could rest safely very close to the cameras. At the same time a cable with some slack kept the power bank from interfering with horizontal adjustments to each camera on each tripod. 

At the end of the program I breathed a sigh of relief. Everything worked as planned. And, the client was able to raise nearly $300,000 in one evening which was sorely needed in that particular period, in which live theaters were so hard hit. No audience? No income.

That experience was one of several that opened my eyes to the value of having several power banks in the studio inventory. On another occasion, during the big ice storm that hit Texas in 2021 our son was staying with us and was working on a big project for his new employer. He was working from home since the roads were impassable. Everything was going well until the power went out and his laptop slowly ran out of juice. Added to that our A/C powered wifi router was also disabled by the outage. 

Power Banks to the rescue. Ben was able to work through the rest of the day and the power was back on here by morning. As soon as the power came back I recharged the power bank --- just in case. Also, he used his phone to create a wifi hotspot and that sucks down phone power. Power Bank #2 to the rescue. 

My Leica SL2 is rechargeable through its USB but the SLs are not. Nor is the Q2. But I have a NiteCore charge for Leica SCL-4 and 6 batteries and it's USB-c powered. I bring a battery bank and the small charger on every remote location; even if I have a box full of already charged camera batteries. Just a little extra insurance. 

What I would really like is to be able to connect a power bank to my battery powered electronic flashes in order to extend their on time during long shooting days and also to make up for the power lost to their incorporated LED modeling lights. With a bank for each flash one could shoot hundreds and hundreds of full power flash photographs and the only caveat would be to watch for the flashes overheating. 

My older banks are workhorses but the one thing the older ones lack is PD. PD stands for Power Delivery and it's a newer standard that allows PD enabled devices (most current iPhones and some Android phones as well as some Apple and Dell laptops and iPadPros) to charge much more quickly. The bank can deliver a higher constant stream of power to the device without damaging it. My newest power bank, the Anker Power Core 26800 mAh PD unit has, as its name suggests, Power Delivery capability. (This is not an affiliate  link and I don't care if you buy a power bank or not.... suit yourself). 

I hadn't thought much about power banks recently but yesterday I got a call from my favorite Architectural Photographer and we had a conversation about extra batteries for his new 100 megapixel Fuji medium format camera. He uses it attached to an Atomos monitor so he can work quickly and with great mobility while also being about to show work in progress to his clients. Inevitably, in a client-rich environment, the camera gets left on and in review mode for long periods of time. And, of course, the 100 megapixels use more power per shot than a lower resolution camera would. 

We discussed various powering options and I mentioned that I routinely charge the battery in my Fuji GFX 50Sii via the camera's USB port. Sometimes it's helpful when going from location to location on jobs --- or for more fun shoots. It's always worked well for me....

I have a feeling my friend will quickly acquire one, and will equally quickly take my recommendation and rig up some Velcro for quick attachment of the bank to a tripod leg. I just makes sense. 

In this age of questionable power, and also more and more requests for shoots in remote locations, it's inevitable that we'll want ample reserves of solid, camera and light feeding voltage in our kits. And, as a blogger it's (ha! ha!) mission critical for my laptop to be always up and running. You never know when inspiration will strike and you have to be ready. 

So, for running power hungry video cameras to keep mission critical laptops alive and humming; for charging your Apple Watch, for keeping LED lights running as long as you need them, for charging camera batteries at your remote campsite, these devices are really nice to have. 

Nope, they won't run your air conditioners, your washing machine and especially not your clothes driers. They won't power jackhammers, or power saws, or that old set of Broncolor studio strobes that every English blogger relies on for their very existence. But for all the nice, useful and well designed gadgets we tend to fill our live with they can be nearly indispensable.  About $75 with 60 Watt PD charger. 

Just my thoughts on it. Yours will probably be vastly different. Fire away. 

No skyscrapers were defrauded in the making of this photograph at Eeyore's Birthday Party. 

Nor mannequins of any kind....

OT: Swimming. An incredibly good article about the health benefits of swimming. At National Geographic (Online).

 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/is-swimming-the-ultimate-workout

If you have a subscription to Apple News or National Geographic you'll love reading all about the benefits of swimming. The takeaway is that for mental health, physical health, emotional health and lots of other stuff swimming is the best workout humans can do. It's not me sayin it. It's National Geographic. 

It makes most other exercises look like sitting in a lounge chair eating jelly donuts. 

Just being in the water is therapeutic because of the physics of water pressure. 

It's what to do when you're finished playing around with cameras and you don't want to do chores...

Here's an inspiring quote from the article: 

"Tanaka points to a study he co-authored analyzing nearly 200 swimmers that shows that people who swim often enjoy more active and satisfying sex lives, and with fewer performance-related issues such as erectile dysfunction and dyspareunia."

just sayin'.

Fun with photography. It's no longer just a serious undertaking...

 Renae in San Antonio. Winning a stuffed animal. Going to a carnival. Posing for me and my Rollei camera. Having a great time. 

Photography can be so much fun if we don't overthink it. Or turn it into an academic quagmire.

Vegetables and markets. So nice to have them...

I'm a bit jealous of people living in cities like Montreal, Quebec, Canada. In addition to several smaller, neighborhood markets they have food havens, amazing marketplaces, like the Jean-Tolon Market, the Atwater Market and the Maisonneuve Market. For photographers who love to make photographs of lush collections of fresh produce, artisanal pastries, cheeses, sauces and other tasty food, these markets are absolute treasures. On my visits to Montreal, mostly in the Fall season, I've spent full days hopping on the Metro to go from market to market to experience just how visually rich this food culture is. 

Austin has several "farmers" markets but they are a fraction of the size and have an even smaller subset of goods and produce to choose from. 

I have some clients who are decorating some dining and kitchen areas and they've asked me to put together a catalog of fresh food images from all over the place. Multiple mini-installations of images being something they are designing around. Over the years I've been involved in a lot of prepared food shoots but it's such a specialized niche in commercial photography now that I'm deferring to dedicated food pros when clients ask. But that doesn't mean for a moment that I'm not interested in making fun and interesting images of "unprepared" foods. Fresh fruits and veggies. Freshly caught fish. Artfully displayed tarts, cakes and pastries. 

In fact, now that we've replaced floor and are in the middle of an extensive interior and exterior painting project (no. I don't do house painting. Some things are best left to professionals...) B. and I are more and more focused on rehabbing the art around the house and in the studio. What used to be a collage of good, bad and mostly sentimental stuff is slowly surrendering to more tightly curated, and consistently framed and presented, work that we're doing ourselves. For ourselves. 

Our local agriculture isn't as diverse as areas of the midwest and northeast. I like to discover new markets in new places. Makes carrying those cameras around more worthwhile...   

The painting project is humorous. At least it is to me. The painters arrived yesterday morning and started wrapping everything in the interior of the house with sheets of plastic. From floor to ceiling in all the areas in which scrapping, sanding, caulking and painting will take place. The interior of my house is like a weird science fiction movie where the characters have to walk through semi-transparent, semi-opaque curtains of plastic to reach livable areas of the house. The living room, one of the bedrooms and one of the bathrooms are the safe zones. Areas previously painted and not on the docket for this go round. 

When I exited our bedroom and headed to the kitchen to brew the life-giving elixir we call, "Coffee" I had to part the plastic curtains at my bedroom door and walk down a long hallway, the floor and carpeting of which were also cosseted in impermeable wrappings. The kitchen and its appliances existed behind floor to ceiling wrappers as well. 

Our dining room table was moved into the "safe space" of the living room and I sat, wedged into a seat, staring at yet another floor-to-ceiling curtain of ephemeral material. Drinking yet another cup of perfect coffee and pre-visualizing this morning's swim. When I came home from my swim practice I watched our two painters wrap all the exterior trim in preparation for treating the exterior raw cedar with a preservation concoction. The application should take place all afternoon. I remember the same, basic experience from five or so years ago and plan to be somewhere else for the afternoon. I'm not at all acclimated to the fumes. 

The guys have switched to the exterior today because we have a window of good weather dry weather today and tomorrow and when the rain returns they hope to be back inside doing the pretty work. These guys are consummate professionals. They are very, very detail oriented and I guess that's why B. uses them for all our painting projects. She's out of town for two days so I'm marginally in charge of making sure everything goes well. I should sneak out and go to a movie instead....

Currently trying to find exemplary food markets/farmers markets in Texas. Let me know if you know of any and are generous enough to share your favorite spots. 

 I seem to be on a carrot jag today....

 

Color week here at HQ. Notes from the front...

 

not a skyscaper.

I just can't resist those round, bulbous parking garage mirrors...

Here is something to understand if your domestic partner's career was as an award-winning art director in the advertising industry; when having the house painted you will go through hell selecting final colors and also ensuring that the final mixed paint is EXACTLY the way she wants it. 

We had our favorite painting company come in last Fall and re-paint our living room. They did a great job but behind the scenes I lived for months with giant swatches of "test" paint on various walls. At times our dining room table was covered with paint swatches and the difference between colors was minuscule to me. But not to B. Now we're having a bigger job done and she's spent days with small cans of test paints applying big swatches to each part that will eventually get painted and trying to look at them and compare the colors at dawn, dusk, on cloudy days and in full sun. When the weather took a turn for cloudy and gloomy we were outside with an expensive LED fixture making our own sunlight at 5400K for evaluation. 

I'm generally of the mindset that color for walls, exterior trim, doors and stuff is largely subjective and I can probably quickly adjust to just about any color we might paint something ---- as long as it's not black, bright orange or deep purple. Art directors tend to be much pickier about colors. MUCH pickier. 

I've spent many late nights doing press checks with B., running big sheets of premium papers on Heidelberg presses and looking at the resulting test sheets with a printer's loupe. A lot of time in viewing booths with highly corrected lighting, which is part of their reason for existence. B. is a tough color critic but not as tough as an art director named, Betty, with whom I worked photographing a number of book cover projects for a text book publisher. Back in the film days certain green colors on book covers were difficult for color transparency films to replicate. You could get "pleasing" color but accurate color was a whole other circle of hell. 

On one job which required 4x5 color transparencies we went through eight different film emulsion tests until we found a Kodak film that was very, very close to our targets. I think it was called EPP but memory (thankfully) fades. I went on a press check with Betty once and watched as one of the pressmen burst into tears of frustration. We eventually got the colors Betty wanted but it was a tough slog and took forever. The resulting brochure was a work of art. Amazingly good. Worth 100% of the effort involved?Maybe not for me but for Betty having the work end up exactly as she envisioned it was critical and that was her standard. 

So, the house painters arrived today and the first thing we did was go over paint formulas and brands. And we double-checked all four colors on the work order. 

We have multiple interiors that need re-painting. "Simply White" (an actual color choice) for the ceiling is like easy days for the painters (and for me) but "Dried Parsley" in an eggshell finish for the long (50 foot) hallway is one of those colors that has to be spot on because one side of the hallway is being painted to match the other side. We're on pins and needles to see if it all works out. 

Everything on the exterior is getting a power wash, scrapping and various other levels of prep. Then the exterior is getting its custom paint colors. All under the ever watchful eye of a seasoned and picky art director. There are interior fixes and treatments as well... 

Various wags bitch about the cost of a Leica M11 or a Leica SL3 but their costs pale in the face of an involved, one week long painting extravaganza. As a grizzled old photographer I'd happily choose a Leica instead and let the wood on the house eventually decay and collapse. But I have a dedicated art director to keep me --- and the house --- on the straight and narrow. It's been five years since the last all out painting episode. That's about the time I started growing in white hair. Correlation? Causality? Coincidence?

Enough about house painting. I guess as long as the paint is an ultra low VOC variety I'll be happy... thank goodness for my own, separate office. Now, where's the coffee?

Work notes: The rumors of my retirement seem to have been premature. A week in San Antonio, a couple of days with attorneys who needed portraits last week, a call from one of my favorite theater groups asking for both a set-up, pre-lit shoot and also a live performance shoot, and then more attorneys booked in near the end of May. Enough to keep the wolves from the doors and the painters well paid. And the Leicas well exercised. All good as long as none of this renewed commercial photography vigor interferes with swimming. 

As part of my rehab from too many images of skyscrapers I'm taking it easy and just doing 

interesting (to me) chunks of historic houses and bushes. Maybe some benches...

this is a Mannequin Bush. a rare species of never dying, short trees that spout flowers.

I guess all trees have flowers of some sort. 

Slowing down enough to appreciate a nice bench in the middle of nowhere. 

Oh! You asked about swimming? Nothing much to tell. You either get it or you don't. Just remember to always be streamlining. 

A Gratuitous Equipment Review. Totally Unscientific. Just Observational.

 

I started out my long connection to photography with a rangefinder camera. A Canon Canonet QL17iii. It was the long time historical precursor to digital cameras like the Leica Q and Q2. A smallish body, solidly built and fitted with a permanent, unchangeable lens. In the case of the Canon the lens was a just right focal length of 40mm. And, like the much later Leicas, the Canon lens featured an f1.7 aperture. 

At some point, a few years after my "initiation" into serious photography via both the Canonet, and time spent in a black and white darkroom, I moved on to other rangefinder cameras. Rangefinder cameras with the ability to change to different lenses. And eventually I entered the cult of Leica cameras via inexpensive, used screw mount (Barnack) and M series cameras and lenses. 

The first was a IIIf. Then an M3 with a 50mm Summicron. And after that a collection of lenses from 35mm to 90mm. Heady times. But cheap enough back then for even a student on a tight budget. My choice in college was between cameras and a car. I always chose the cameras. Having a car in Austin didn't help you shoot better in Mexico City, or somewhere else you reached by airplane (or bus). 

There are tradeoffs everywhere in photography gear. The original Leica M3 was blessed with a .91X viewfinder. Current M cameras have either .68X or .72X viewfinders. The vastly better magnification of the M3 finder made for easy use of 75mm and 90mm lenses and even made working with a 135mm lens somewhat practical. The higher magnification of the finder also increased focusing accuracy for every focal length. The tradeoff? The finder only showed bright frame lines for 50mm, 75mm, 90mm and 135mm lenses. Nothing for the wide angles. If you wanted to use 28mm and 35mm lenses with your M3 you'd need an external bright line finder sitting in the accessory shoe of your fine camera. 

The Leica M240 cameras (all variants) use a .68X viewfinder which is just barely wide enough to accommodate frame lines for a 28mm lens...if you can get your eye close enough. But what it "gains" at the wide end it throws away at the long end. I find the lower magnification finders unusable for 135mm focal lengths and barely adequate at 90mm. The image in the viewfinder is just so small. So, for me, the sweet spot, or point of less pain, when using lenses longer than 50mm is the 75mm focal length. The bright lines in the finder are easy to see and pretty easy to compose with while the rangefinder is still accurate enough to provide sharp focus even at close distances with the aperture at wide open. Of course, this is all dependent on your camera's rangefinder being accurately calibrated and using lenses that were manufactured with the right mechanical tolerances.... (caveat emptor!).

When I bought a 90mm lens for the system it was mostly as an "emergency" focal length for those times when I had convinced myself that I could do any sort of project with just my M series cameras and lenses ---and then got stuck needing something a bit longer than my normal range. But in my brain I presumed (and accurately so) that I'd get a lot more use out of an M mount 90mm lens adapted to an SL or SL2 than I would in getting daily use out of it on an M240. For some even more extra reach there is always the option of putting the 90mm lens on (via an adapter) one of the CL cameras and then taking advantage of a (cropped) 135mm equivalent. But from experience I knew that unless I was shooting film and using an M6 with a .85X finder (an option available back in the film days when Leica made three different finder magnification bodies for the M6 line....) or an M3 with its .91X finder, that I'd never be really happy with lenses longer than 75mm on a rangefinder camera. 

Once I'd acquired a second M240 body I presumed it was safe to start buying more lenses for the system. I already had the 28, 35, 40, and 50mm focal lengths in hand and I started looking around at the 75mm options for M. There are used 75mm f2.5 Summarit lenses from Leica but I reviewed the Summarit lineup when I was reviewing the M9 camera for a commercial website (back in the day) and I was never really blown away. Good lenses but a lesser build quality than other Leica optics and I never experienced the maximum optical performance that other Leica lenses can delivery.

I looked at the Leica APO Summicron, which I am certain is a great lens, but I didn't feel like dropping nearly five grand for what is, basically, a secondary system lens for me. Ditto the $14,000+ 75mm APO Noctilux f1.25 lens. I looked at the Voigtlander catalog and narrowed down my choice to that between the 75mm f1.5 (bigger and bulkier + pricier) and the much more recently introduced 75mm f1.9. Reading all the available reviews the consensus seemed to be that by the time you had each lens at f2.8 (which is where you'll probably spend your most time...) both lenses were nearly identical. Maybe even a slight nod to the f1.9 model. Which is much smaller, lighter and ... cheaper. I bought one. 

Judging the lens separately from the Leica M cameras by putting it on an SL2 I find that the lens is sharp enough at f1.9 to be quite usable for portrait work and most situations where center sharpness is key. That being said, everything gets better at f2.8 and by f4.0 the lens is as good as anything I currently use across the systems. Maybe the Sigma 70mm Macro Art lens is sharper. But if it is my eyes have a hard time seeing much difference at everyday f-stops.

As I expected, the 75mm focal length is harder for me to use on an M240 than is a 35mm or 50mm lens. My eyes are older, the frame lines are smaller, and judging the exact point on which the rangefinder is measuring takes perhaps more day to day practice than I have brought to the fore recently. 

There are no real downsides to the lens that I can see. There are plenty of charming attributes that I appreciate and became more aware of while photographing at the Eeyore's event yesterday. The lens is very small and light for its focal length and speed. The focus throw is fair short so I don't spend time cranking the focusing ring around and around (see the Milvus 50mm f1.4 lens --- it takes an afternoon to get from the closest focusing distance all the way around to infinity...).  And, as I can see from taking a bunch of photographs at f2.8, the lens provides very sharp images when used correctly. Focused close and using wider apertures you can get dreamy good background areas of near zero focus. It's pretty charming. 

My takeaway? If you have to use a focal length longer than 50mm with a .68X mag. viewfinder on a Leica M you should not waste your money on buying the finest or fastest. You'll likely be using whatever long lens you put on your M Leica in a more casual and considered way. And you have to admit to the physics limitations of  focusing triangulation with lower magnification baselines in current rangefinder cameras. While a great rangefinder systems beats the socks off most AF cameras in the 21mm to 50mm range the advantage of through the lens focusing and image magnification in the EVF quickly beat the coupled, mechanical rangefinder for focusing accuracy from 75mms on up. In fact, my favorite use of the 75mm and 90mm lenses from Voigtlander, both M mount products, is with them sitting on the front of an SL camera and me punching it to make sure I've nailed the focusing stuff down to the eyelashes. Or the pupils. 

With this considered I think of the 75mm VM f1.9 as a hybrid-capable lens. Happy on an M camera and even happier on an EVF mirrorless Leica. At around $600 it's a bargain. And, as it has no other features than good optics and a smooth focusing ring there is substantially less to go wrong with it. Here's some images from the lens that I took yesterday. I tried to find skyscrapers and mannequins but none were available at this location. I had to settle for images of real people. Quelle Horreur. C'est la vie.

Warning: Some images may be considered NSFW in some midwestern US states and especially in deep south US states. No buildings or mannequins or other bloggers' feelings were harmed in the presentation of these random images from Eeyore's Birthday Party at Pease Park in Austin, Texas. Check back later for gear notes.

 

Added: Gear Notes. All images taken using a Leica M240 camera set to uncompressed DNG. Two lenses utilized. The Carl Zeiss 50mm f2.0 and the Voigtlander VM 75mm f1.9. Processed in Lightroom Classic. Minimal processing beyond exposure and contrast.

Eeyore's Birthday Party has evolved from a small gathering of English majors from UT to a counter culture gathering of pot heads and hippies to, finally, a family friendly, PG rated fund raiser for mainstream Austin non-profits. It's lost its cool edge but is now more accessible to more people and it maintains an Austin vibe. The pot smoke was more subdued this year. The public nudity much more restrained, the family friendly stuff made much more pervasive. Kind of kills the interest for some photographers but I'm a believer in inclusion so there is that. 

I walked through and ran into Jerry Sullivan who, until recently, was the owner and operator of Precision Camera. He was sporting an M series Leica and some fun lenses. He had, in tow, Pete Holland who founded Holland Photo Lab many years ago. He retired about ten years back and he was making fun images today with a Ricoh GR111x camera. I ran into my friend from lunch the day before and he was sporting a new camera which shall, for the immediate future, remain ambiguous. 

I walked down a mile from my car and carried with me a Leica M240 and a couple of lenses. It all worked well. 

Since it is my blog I put in photographs that I liked. When I came home and got cleaned up B. and I went to our favorite neighborhood restaurant. It's closing for good on Tuesday. Some investor from California is raising the rent on the space the restaurant has occupied for decades by an additional 300%. Haven't they heard that Austin is imploding? Don't they want to head back home and continue messing stuff up in their own back yard?

In other notes, Austin restaurant, Jeffrey's, sold a bottle of wine a couple of weeks ago for the princely sum of $60,000. The gratuity on the bottle service was a whopping $14,000. Apparently Austin isn't out of the running for the most Ostentatious City in the Country just yet....

I like big events in the park that DON'T have: VIP tents. VIP shuttles. VIP bars. VIP early entry, etc. Eeyore's raises money for non-profits. For charities. Nobody gets rich from Eeyore's. Looking at you, trough feeders at ACL and SXSW.....

Just normal, mostly well adjusted people, collectively enjoying an afternoon in a beautiful park. With tens of thousands of other like-minded people. Nice. No valet parking. No heliports. 

And kids. Lots and lots of kids. Always looking to the future. 

Hope you like the photos.