Sightseeing while on the job. Miami. South Beach.

I was providing photographic coverage of a conference in South Beach being held by Broadwing Communications, one of the casualties of the dot.com boom. In the three years that they plowed through billions of American dollars I went along for the ride. Once in a while I'd end up in a nice Hotel like the Delano wondering when the music would stop (literally and figuratively). After a busy morning of photographing executives addressing sales people in a conference room I had the afternoon off. I walked down the beach from the hotel and found some huge tents on the beach.

It was the annual Latin Fashion Festival. With a bag full of Leica R cameras and some really cool looking lenses, plus my ASMP membership card, I was quickly able to talk myself into a press pass and an "all access" pass. I stumbled around clicking away with reckless abandon.

Art.

Eventually my time was up. I trudged back for the evening conference activities. I changed from film to digital, took a shower and changed from casual to coat and tie and headed back down to another serious exposure to corporate culture. 

I liked shooting color negative film with my Leica R cameras and the fast lenses. One of my favorites was the 80mm Summilux. I also liked the 180 f2. Ektapress 400 was my film of choice.

On a totally different note: I'm taking a little time off. I'm chilling and then I'm traveling. I won't be posting anything new on the blog until Friday the 15th. In the interim there are over 1,400 blog posts on the site. Just find the icon on the right side of the screen that directs you to the archives by year. Reading past blogs is totally optional, there will be no test.

It would be lovely if you took advantage of the time off to click through one of the Amazon links below and load up your shopping cart with all kinds of really cool stuff. You know, like expensive cameras and multiple copies of my five books. I'll get a small commission from Amazon for your purchases and you'll get lots of cool stuff. It won't cost you any more to click through the site.

Hope I have a few pictures to share from Boston when I get back...

If you are in Austin or plan to be in Austin before May 12th, go to the HRC and see the Arnold Newman Show.

"Photography is very unreal. You take a three-dimensional world and reduce it to two. You take color and reduce it to black and white. And you arrest the flow of time. There are many things that are very false about photography. You must recognize this, and build on it, and they maybe you'll have art."  -Arnold Newman.

My friend, Wyatt, e-mailed me a few days ago and suggested that I post information here about the Arnold Newman show at the Harry Ranson Center (aka: The Humanities Research Center) on the University of Texas at Austin campus. I was embarrassed when I realized that the show opened a couple of weeks ago and I hadn't been.

I don't recommend shows I haven't seen so I got into the futuristic Visual Science Lab car and headed over to the UT campus. Okay, the show is amazing. If you are a big fan of Arnold Newman's brilliant, black and white environmental portraiture you'll be in heaven. The entire ground floor of the museum is dedicated to showcasing hundreds of wonderful prints. If you aren't a big fan or you don't know who Arnold Newman is (go Google now...we'll wait) this show might surprise you.

"Oh, people set up these nonsensical rules and regulations. You can't crop, you can't dodge your print, etc., etc…  But the great photographers that these people admire all did that!" -Arnold Newman.

The venue is wonderful. And today was even more wonderful. While photography experts might come to the consensus that Arnold Newman is easily in the "top ten" of influential and amazingly insightful photographers who worked in the 20th century the show was made even more special for me because.....I was the only person in attendance. No line in front of the incredibly famous Stravinsky portrait (along with the contract prints and various croppings). No line in front of the Alfred Krupp or Picasso portraits either. Just an enormous, quiet, well lit room with me and a couple hundred amazing, black and white prints... Wyatt was right. If you're coming within 100 miles of Austin this should be on your list of "must sees."  Maybe even before Franklin's BBQ and the Continental Club.

"Successful portraiture is like a three-legged stool. Kick out one leg and the whole thing collapses. In other words, visual ideas combined with technological control combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold its own." -Arnold Newman.

When I finished staring at the beautifully crafted, fiber, black and white prints of equally interesting artists, actors and thought leaders of Newman's time I was a bit sad. It was obvious that photographers had much more leeway in the last half of the 20th century that perhaps we ever will again. The work showed a depth of conceptualism that made it more than a record or a magazine space filler. The background information conveyed by the curators of the exhibit made clear the reality that Newman could work on a portrait session until he got what he wanted....and he was able to solicit a collaboration with most of his sitters based on an intellectual sharing, and by using time as an ally.

The work is an amazing testament to the idea that people like Newman were creating art that pleased them first and sometimes singularly instead of just fulfilling the needs of a client.

If you want to see what photography was like when craft, talent, intellect and intention were required for success (not just good social media) you owe it to yourself to see this first hand. It's one of the best photography shows I have seen in ages. Made even more magnetic when you realize that he worked with a 4x5 inch view camera for most of his career and much preferred natural light and continuous light to electronic flash....

Wyatt was right. I was duty bound to report this one.

Lens Profile Happiness in Lightroom 4.4

This is one of those goofy photos you take when you want to check in on the performance of a new lens or camera. It's not going in the portfolio. Why did I take it? Because I wanted to see how a particular lens worked on a new-ish camera and with new lens profiles supplied with the upgrade to Lightroom 4.4.

I'll back up. I bought a Sigma 10 to 20mm f4.5-5.6 lens last year to use on an assignment photographing a new Whole Foods store. My primary camera at the time was a Sony a77 and while the 16-50mm lens was great for most stuff I wanted something with a bit wider angle of view. I researched the possible options and flipped a coin. The Sigma won. While the 16-50mm 2.8 DT lens was fully corrected for vignetting and geometric distortion by in camera profiles none were available either in the camera or in LR for the lens at that time. On the shots I took with the lens I added time to my post production routine to mess around with the edges and corners in DXO software. The results were fine for the project at hand. Not quite as good a performance as the 16-50mm but certainly very acceptable.

I was working in the latest ish of Lightroom a few days ago when I started looking to see if there were any new profiles for lenses I owned. I found profiles for the two Sigma/Nex lenses I recently bought, the 19mm and the 30mm. I kept looking and also found a profile for the Sigma 10-20mm. 

I like the two primes and I was curious to see if the Sigma 10-20mm, when combined with the amazing sensor in the Nex-7 and supplemented with the correction in LR, would have much improved imaging characteristics over the uncorrected performance last summer on the a77 DSLT, fixed mirror camera.

This building, under construction, provided a nice range of lines and textures. I thought it would be a good test. I used the lens with an LA-EA1 adapter, which has no mirror, only contacts for electronic information and primitive AF. I decided to use manual focus and focus peaking instead.

The Nex-7 has a very  high performance sensor with high sharpness. I'm very, very happy with the performance of the combined camera hardware and Lightroom corrections for this lens.

The image just above is of painted plywood barriers that surround the construction project. I thought it was a nice test of the lens's ability to render texture and a pleasing rendering of the saturated green paint.

As usual, performance parameters of modern cameras and lenses are moving targets which are influenced and changed by the influence of software driven corrections. It pays to check in frequently to see if some part of your imaging system has been improved and may provide increased performance metrics without having to upgrade.

Having done this test I'll be less reticent to use the combination for architectural projects in the future. Have I mentioned just how much I like the Sony Nex 7? 

Mindfulness and photography.

Images from Grapes of Wrath

I was having lunch with two creative directors yesterday. We were eating tacos at one of my favorite new (to me) restaurants, Garrido's. At some point we started talking about lost skill sets and the march of progress. There seems to be a thread of thought these days that goes something like this: "People will always chose a lesser product or service if it's easier to use and cheaper."

It's no big news when people who've been in a business for a generation or two start to bemoan the current state of the industry and then compare it to how things were in the good old days. But one of us postulated that, the process drives the creativity.  It's also true when stated the other way around. Creativity can drive the process. What we mostly agreed upon was the idea that making a process quicker and easier generally lessens the amount of thought and effort, trial and error, and experimentation that goes into it. Being able to separate the creation of photograph from the compulsion to "fix" what has already been created, through the use of filters and post processing also diminishes the authenticity of the process.

I'm not sure it's the new tools or the easy laziness of software dependence that's to blame for all the boring photography I see all over the place as much as I think it's a result of a society that's lost the ability to really concentrate and be in the moment when they are working. Even when we are working on our own creative projects. There are so many distractions. The ubiquity of the cellphone creates an anticipatory existence wherein we are constantly poised and on alert for the next text or phone call. The brain becomes bifurcated and thought diluted.

While everyone under thirty (forty?) will rush to demagogue this statement I really believe that at the point in our collective history when we allowed ourselves to be 100% available to everyone else we lost our ability to be 100% available to our own selves and our own processes. When we acquiesced to the concept of being "on call" we lost our ability to be really "mindful" about anything in our lives.

It's not digital cameras or online sharing that's causing our pleasure in seeing images to evaporate it's just our sudden (one decade) inability to concentrate fully on either the creation or the enjoyment anymore. It's the same mindset as sitting in a theater watching a movie and compulsively texting to find out what everyone else is doing now and what they will be doing in the immediate future. Our collective fear of being left out is draining our resources to opt fully in.

It's like trying to make love while checking for messages. It's a compulsion. It's also an epidemic.

I wonder if we, as photographers, can come back to a place of real mindfulness when taking images.

Everything we seem to create mitigates against it. I walked with several photographers last month. What a mistake. One kept getting calls from his spouse...which he answered. Another kept showing us "interesting" new apps on his phone. But the whole idea of a group walk with the idea of taking images is about as silly as it gets....if your goal is to make photographs for the sake of your own art. It's like creating the ultimate distraction and then making it portable.

Wouldn't it be an interesting exercise, on many levels, to set aside a day in which you pursue a really focused and mindful day just for taking images for yourself? Wouldn't it be cool to schedule a day that went from sun up to sun down (or later) in which you took only one camera and one lens. A day on which you threw away all the excuses and left your phone at home, in a drawer? A day where photography didn't revolve around the discover of chic new restaurants but actually revolved around your own undiluted looking and critical observation. A day when you thought about every single time you pushed the shutter button and made a photograph?  A day when no one came along for the ride?

I understand that for some people photography is an excuse to socialize and that's fine. But the people who roll that way probably aren't the same ones who read my stuff here. You don't have to be serious all the time. But it might be nice to make a date with yourself to be unencumbered at least some of the time.

Paying attention. Focused on one thing. Reducing distraction. Being totally there for your own life.

(Can you imagine an actor stopping between lines, in the middle of a performance, to check their phone?)