On the River

 Yesterday a shoot happened on about 24 hours notice, Chey was passing through the Bay Area so we met halfway, on the upper Russian River. It was my first real opportunity to put the M10 through it's paces in a model shoot.

First, the technical details. The battery was at 95 percent charge at the start. After an hour and a half of near continuous shooting and 474 images, LCD turned off and checked only a few times to verify exposure, at the end it was still at 60 percent charge. Better than I expected. I'll probably eventually get a spare battery just in case, but it's not urgent.

I tested limits on dynamic range. In the image above, the sun is just over the mountains, low near-backlight, the model mostly in the shade of the willows on the opposite bank and with the sun catching her hair and arms. The M10 very nearly held onto all the detail. It's not flawless, but it's impressive. Most anything I've used before, digital or film, this would have been hopeless lighting.

On the creative side, we worked in a riparian space, mostly rocks bounded by trees, not more than 30 feet square. We really couldn't go outside that box, the river was deep and cold despite no recent rain and the overgrown bank and proximity of the highway limited where we could work at a location neither of us had visited before. That wasn't a concern, we found plenty of angles and compositions and Chey did a great job of taking my concept and running with it. If anything there are too many strong images, it's difficult to select just a few. A nice problem to have. I've done post on about 16 of them so far and will live with those for a while and then take a fresh look.

The weather cooperated, a mild 70 degrees at the afternoon start, not bad for this time of year and a nice break from recent coastal fog for me. Overall, a fun shoot.

 This is from a July 2020 shoot near Crescent City. I sometimes do trade shoots with local models (up here, 100 miles away still counts as local) who have little experience, it helps me stay sharp and it gets them some portfolio material. Ellen Eli is in that category, and she has some potential with enough experience.

When we frame the image, we crop out elements of the real world. In this case, there was a large family having a picnic on top of the hill to the right. Also the models rarely get enough credit; it never really gets warm on the beach in northern California, and this day was no exception. She still needs to pretend she's not cold.

Brooke

One of the June 2021 images of Brooke Eva... a different image from the set, not one of the ones on LFI.
 

LFI

 

Last night on a whim I uploaded a few photos to LFI (Leica Fotographie International). Two of them (not the one above, which is from a recent Mojave Desert trip) were highlighted today: A different desert shot, from the same trip but further north in the Basin and Range Desert, which is today's cover shot in the Landscape category; and an art nude of Brooke Eva from June. While I think they're good photos, it's still always an honor when someone else, in this case someone who is paid to peer review images, agrees.

I periodically come back to the landscape theme, but this year is the first time in over 20 years that I've really put much sustained effort into it. Last time it was built around trips to classic landscape spots, Joshua Tree and Yosemite and was done in black & white on medium format (great fun hauling bulky cameras and tripods around rugged off trail terrain). Looking back, the images are technically exquisite and emotionally mediocre. Too rigid, too predictable. 

This time, I'm in a color mood and shooting with the M10. I brought two lenses, my standard 50 Summicron and a 28 Elmarit. I used the wide angle for three or four images, put it away, and went back to the 50. Right now I'm seeing in 50mm perspective and that's working just fine. Whoever made the rule about wide angles for landscapes was probably the same person who made all the other silly rules. More on that some other time.

I'm also not cropping out less natural features anymore. Last March on a work trip to the Sonoran desert I learned a lot about desert ecosystems and the various human degradations, so I'm seeing them now. And at some point I made a semi-conscious decision not to pretend it's all pristine, because it's not. So, when it works in the composition, like the dirt track in the image above, it stays. Yeah I could have shifted left and cropped it out, and it wouldn't have been as strong an image. In this case there's natural disturbance (Mono-Inyo Craters in the distance, which erupted in the past 1,000 years) and un-natural disturbance (the dirt track, and probably the creosote bush structure and some patches of invasives if one looks closely enough, and the bush in the foreground is at the edge of a trail).

Sometimes I actively sought out certain types of disturbance. The featured image on LFI includes burned creosote bush, and fire is more frequent now in the desert because invasive grasses carry fire. It's visually stark, and says a few things about humans and the land even if seeing and understanding it requires a basic grasp of ecology.

I'm not forcing the landscape images at this point. I'm putting myself out there and hopefully seeing, and then capturing what I see. Over time a coherent series will come together, I hope. Either way, the intent is to enjoy the journey.

Point of Departure

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let's get equipment out of the way right up front, because it does influence the way I see. First, philosophy: In general, I agree with the old cliche that a good photographer can get good images with most anything. That said, quality equipment brings certain big advantages. 

Reliability, for one. I don't bang cameras around the way I did in the photojournalism days, however they are still tools. I don't want to worry about a minor impact or a few minutes in the rain putting gear out of commission. Pro-level gear holds up to pro level abuse, so it can handle my current serious amateur level abuse with ease. Not worrying about that frees my mind for other things. Reliable, well built gear costs more to design and construct. It's less likely to need repair later. 

Then there are lenses. It's possible to soften sharp images, it's not possible to sharpen soft images (much). Sharp lenses, especially wide open or at the edges, are expensive. That's simple reality. 

Finally, there are ways of seeing influenced by the gear. View cameras are great for landscapes from a tripod. Medium format is awesome in the studio, or whenever one is not in too much of a hurry and quality matters more than speed and spontaneity. SLR's and the newest EVF digital cameras are great for long lenses, macro work, and one type of working quickly. Right now I'm not needing most of that. 

Since about 1998 I've been shooting primarily Leica rangefinder. The little rangefinders are perfect for my photojournalism-influenced documentary way of working. They're compact, easy to carry, discrete, and fast for getting one or two shots. They're good at low light photography. I use three of them. 

The first is a M6TTL purchased new in 1998 or 99. I traded some other gear to soften the bite of that one, and I still have it today after thousands of images on film. It's been in once for a CLA, and has been utterly reliable. because it has a built in meter, I tend to use it for less leisurely film work. It generally mounts a 50mm Summilux purchased used for not very much by modern standards, a little worn around the edges but wonderful at wide-open rendering. 

The M4 was purchased used a few years later as a backup. It sees less use, mostly when I'm wandering on a quiet weekend and not in a hurry, or in a back to basics mood when using a hand-held meter feels right. In some ways I prefer the M4 body, it's slightly smaller (in height), balances a bit better, has the intangible smoothness of the the old brass cameras. Sometimes it wears one of the 50 mm lenses, sometimes a silver 35mm Summicron that I bought on consignment 20 years ago for a steal. 

Until recently, the digital component of the triad was an M8. It generated wonderful images which I sometimes printed to 13x19 inches. By Leica standards it was loud, the deeper/fatter digital body made it bulkier, and the 1.3x crop factor drove me crazy. Still, I used it for well over a decade after buying it as a deeply marked down demo and it had something over 15,000 actuations. 

Those three cameras were used for most of the images on earlier posts. 

Ever since the M10 was released in 2017 the plan has been to trade up. I skipped over the intermediate "typ" models because they had, in my opinion, lost some of the minimalism. The typ 240 especially was never an option (video? In a Leica? seriously?). When the M10 solved the size issue and came in at the same size as an M6 TTL and with none of the extras and with simplified menus and layout, I knew it was almost time. There are lots of other subtle and not so subtle advances, there are plenty of good review out there to read about those (I especially recommend https://www.reddotforum.com/content/2017/02/leica-m10-review-the-quintessential-digital-m/ ). 

A few weeks ago while in San Francisco, visiting the office I never physically work from, I traded the M8 in for an M10. The trade in value was higher than expected, making it an easy decision. That's the almost new M10 in the photo at the top; technically used and thus deeply discounted, but essentially unmarked and in the original box. Someone bought it and never really used it. The M10 has facilitated lots of recent random shooting, getting back in practice, photographing meaningless things just to see what it would do. That's been valuable, a way to get back in practice, to sharpen up ability to see and react. Mostly I've used an old Canadian-made 50mm Summicron, a little beat up and acquired as a bargain a long time ago, and wonderfully sharp with the 24MP sensor. F2.0 is plenty for a high-ISO capable M10, so that lens is likely to live on the camera most of the time. I can go months without changing lenses. 

Today I went back to the M6 and film for the first time in a couple weeks, now that the initial novelty is past. 

So that's where we're starting the journey. I'm considering selling a few of the old Nikons and other things still lurking in drawers, because I never use them anymore and don't really need them and they deserve to be used. I could get by 99% of the time with just my Leicas.

Resurrection

It's time to re-activate this. Why this aging platform? Because like many others I stopped posting on another certain blog because of corporate acquisition and censorship. For a few years I just got out of the habit of posting at all. I like the ability to post whatever I'm working on though, and I've always worked in both words and images. That works here. I've activated the adult content warning because there's some of that on older posts, although I'm doing a lot less of that currently. For now, this will be a place to talk about my return to taking photography more seriously. A small group of young creatives has come to town, in the process helping me to realize that I missed the day to day photography that had largely given way to occasional... lately, very occasional... organized photo shoots. By just carring a camera down to Main Street most mornings for coffee, and then talking shop, lots of random images happen. One here, three there instead of 200 in a couple hours, although that will still occasionally happen too. It's also been an opportunity to share knowledge with folks who are passionate about photography, but hadn't been born when I began my photojournalism career. There are also two exhibits up currently, the first two I've done in years. That's generated more opportunities to meet interesting people and talk about assorted creative things. Initially, I'll talk about my thought process as creating images once again becomes a frequent event. I'll post results. I'll talk some, initially, about equipment although we should be past that pretty quickly. There may be some observations on what I'm seeing elsewhere. After that, who knows. Let's see where it goes.