Some more images from Iceland and an "after action" report from yesterday's photo shoot at a law office. And a bunch of images at the bottom of the show at Esther's Follies. Last nigh!

the images above have nothing to do with the writing below. 

nothing at all. They are from a trip to Iceland in 2018.

I loaded two small cases and a bag of nightstands into the new car. A light rain had been falling most of the morning and seemed to get a bit more emphatic as I arranged the gear in the trunk (boot?) of the car. The destination was two miles away. If that. My project for the day was to make photographs at a small law office and to end up with nice working portraits of everyone, individually, candid shots of people in their offices. More candid shots of various combinations of "people in meetings in the conference room" and then, of course, signage and office decor. A routine job the likes of which I've been doing for a long, long time. 

Just to add a little friction to my afternoon I decided I'd ditch all the medium format and full frame camera gear I usually press into service and instead have a go at it using just the tiny, cute Leica CL cameras and a small collection of Sigma's Contemporary lenses --- the one's made for cropped frame L mount cameras --- of which the Leica CL is the only model I know of...

The two used most often yesterday were the 18-50mm f2.8 and the 56mm f1.4. Both are wonderful. Love em. Nice and sharp but small and light. 

Light can be so simple if one doesn't overthink it. I brought along four little flashes. Two of them were Godox V1 units that are pretty powerful and have long-lasting, dedicated, lithium batteries. In an office environment like a conference room the usual ambient lighting is generally a soft ceiling fixture and a bunch of downward facing can lights. So nearly all the light generally comes from above. A little bit bleeds in from windows. 

I like to turn off the room lighting and instead depend on the two V1 lights bouncing off the ceiling to create a nice, soft, centralized wash of light from above. I supplement this with a small flash aimed into a small umbrella and used at about the same intensity as the top light. I use this to provide a bit of direction to the light in the room. Most of the units end up being set to about 1/4 power and in that range the batteries last for three or four hundred flashes. 

With the 18-50mm lens set to f4.0 I can get good exposures at between 200 and 400 ISO just about anywhere in the room. In the old days I  would have remained glued to a tripod but now I like to move around the 180° degree arc opposite the people sitting around one end of the conference table. Three people at a time, max. Otherwise the people end up being too small in the frame and, for use on the internet, in a web site, fewer people in the frame means a more graphically simple image and one that works better at the lower resolutions used. Make sense to me. 

It was nice to work with small cameras and lightweight lenses. Sure, the batteries don't last long enough in the cameras and the rear screen is a bit low res but all in all the CL is still a very, very workable camera for lots of different jobs. 

And for something entirely different, the next evening I found myself in the third row of the audience for the Thursday evening show of Esther's Follies, a 50+ year Austin tradition. A bawdy, hilarious almost Vaudevillian show of songs, political humor, Texas self-humor and magic acts. Not rated PG...

I'd shot a rehearsal for the show a week earlier but I wanted to come back and try my hand at a live show with a full audience. No lights, no tripods, just a handheld Leica SL (the original) and the 24-90mm zoom lens. And....oh boy. The lighting, at least for photography, is terrible. The audience was 99% great except for the audience member in the row behind me who got up mid show to head for the bar to get his third or fourth mixed drink. As he shuffled back to his seat, wobbling the whole time I he managed to spill part of his drink on my head, my shirt and my camera. Too plastered to notice he finally made it back to his chair and began a running narration of the show to no one in particular. 

I know one thing, the drink had a lot of vodka in it. I wiped off the camera and lens and kept shooting. I figured the alcohol would disinfect any germs that might have adhered to the rig. 

Shooting and and around an audience from a stationary position is frustrating but do-able. I plowed through about 1700 frames, hoping to play the odds and get at least three or four hundred shots that are well exposed and in focus. Looking at the take today in Lightroom I think I was successful. 

I ducked out during the final bows and headed back to my car. I got there just as a meter reader was writing me a ticket. But I had paid the meter!!! I protested but the meter reader (a very sweet young woman) showed me on her digital data device that I had mis-entered my car license number. I showed her my receipt and she cancelled the ticket. Finally made it home  and warmed up some left over enchiladas for dinner. The end of a long and somewhat productive day. 

24-90 is a great focal length range for shooting close to the stage for a live show. Better than shooting with two cameras and two lenses and trying to decide between them...

And that's about it.

I've been photographing these guys for decades. Always a nice change of pace from corporate advertising work. Much faster paced. Much less prep. But always fun, even when you go home with your hair, your shirt and your camera smelling like spilt vodka....