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.

colors

Just a couple of days after the shoot with Beth, I was on an airplane to Chicago. Mostly it was a business trip, and a fairly full one; but it overlapped two weekends, and I'd scheduled a couple of shoots on the logic that it wasn't going to be getting any warmer in the Midwest for a while, and (hopefully) I wouldn't need to be back there for a few months. So it was last chance til spring to work through the backlog.

The first shoot was an unusual one; a model from Milwaukee, a newbie not on any of the standard sites yet, who found me through, I think, this blog. I rarely take shoots from newbies anymore, unless there's something unique or unusual about them. This one qualified, she was bald... not only bald, but hairless. No eyebrows, no hair anywhere.

Unfortunately, she wasn't ready for nudity, it was mostly a lingerie shoot. I booked it for early Sunday morning, only 12 hours after I'd gotten off the plane. Really it was a tune-up for other things later in the trip.

Most of the action was on the second weekend. Saturday was a shoot with Gia Maze, that's her in the photo above. At the time of the shoot she was three weeks away from a bodybuilding competition, pretty much in peak shape. She's a pleasure to work with, a very clear communicator, prompt, zero drama. For this one it was back to my post-industrial concept, a little more fitting under the circumstances. Normally those are black and white, but I just couldn't turn off the colors, the spectacular ink and the mane of red hair.

The intent had been to do another shoot on Sunday with an old friend, but she's dealing with some fairly serious health issues recently. We were both disappointed, but decided to wait a while to shoot, possibly when she's on the west coast this winter. Better to be safe. We'd just shot a couple of months earlier, so really all we were losing was a chance to take advantage of the fall colors, which were less than optimal this year.

I'd expected to be done at that point, but one more shoot fortuitously came together before the end of the trip, just barely. More on that a little later.

trinity #2

One more of Beth on the Trinity River; we're standing in full sunlight on a cobble bar along one shoreline, with the near-vertical rock outcrop on the opposite shore in full shadow.

trinity

Beth has become one of my favorite models. Initially we worked together on fashion shoots; a couple of years ago, at the end of a catalog shoot for a local designer who paid both of us, Beth approached me and asked about doing an art shoot. The next day we were out at the dunes creating images.

Although she already excelled at fashion work, there's a different kind of learning curve for art photography. There's nothing to hide mistakes. We did pretty well that first time, but it got better with each successive shoot. Beth is now at the amazing level in both the fashion and art nude genres, in my opinion. I've just finished choosing 44 images to work on from the most recent shoot, such a wealth of good things that it was very difficult to choose.

Beth is a chameleon, as are so many fashion girls. Her hair is different each time, and she seems to be a whole new person. This time she'd cut her hair short. She's also been dancing a lot, with a resulting obvious improvement in lean muscle tone.

We set the shoot for early October. Initially I'd planned a major excursion to a remote wilderness area southeast of where I live, it would have been two hours of driving each way with most of it on national forest roads. Fate intervened, a little before meeting time Beth called to tell me her car wouldn't start. So, a change of plans: I drove 30 minutes north and picked her up. On a whim, we decided to stay north, to shoot on the Trinity River instead.

It took about an hour to find a spot a little east of Willow Creek, a river access point that neither of us had ever visited before. The walk in was something a little less than a mile, and very steep on about half of that. The officially designated wild and scenic Trinity River flows in a deep canyon at this point, rocks and Douglas fir looming overhead on the walls of the gorge. The advantage of a difficult hike in, of course, is that there are typically very few other people around. We saw only two others on this warm and sunny day, two women who were friendly and open-minded enough that we just kept shooting as they waved and walked by.

The footing was often precarious as we scrambled over steep rock faces and boulder fields perched over the deep and cold river. The sun was bright and the shadows strong, but with some careful metering I was able to hang onto the highlights. An occasional puffy white cumulus cloud offered softer lighting. We stayed for several hours, alternately shooting and talking.

On the way out we paused at a large puddle in the trail, not far from the parking lot, for a few shots with a very different feel. Then it was back in the Jeep for the ride back to town.

Because of extended travel it's only today that I've had time to really work on the images.