Happy Birthday and much love to my big sister, Linda. So amazing to have her as a friend at this age. We are really the only two left in our family and I think we both feel really so fortunate to have each other and that we’re both healthy and sane and sober (for the moment 😉
Love you, Linda, and thank you for your friendship and you guys have a great day I’m sure watching the Steelers. Talk to you later today!!!
Great day meeting up with an old friend from Pittsburgh, the great, and I mean great, jazz guitarist, Eric Susoeff. Eric is originally from Southern California and loves to come back home here to carry on his life-long love affair with surfing. I don’t really have the gear for shooting surfing but I was happy to try to grab a few shots. Hope you like them, Eric!
Another day like this one…
Sometimes the message gets lost in the flow and crush of humanity. Click on the image for a larger version.
I’ve never posted this picture because I always considered it such a painful failure. To focus the camera quickly enough. And it really bothered me for a long time. But now looking at it, I just remember the incredible moment, the light, the beauty and I don’t remember the pain of failure so much anymore.
One of my favorite crazy light spots. The grit and color of real people living real lives. The 50mm Leica Summicron doing what it does and has always done. Nailing reality to a frame of film or to a digital camera sensor. I’ve got nothing else to say.
I think images should require something from the person who is looking upon them. A photograph doesn’t or shouldn’t have to be obvious in order to be something that holds some value. I think this image could be taken as an example of that. I don’t want to say much more about the picture itself. It either makes a statement to you or it doesn’t. It made a statement to me.
Now it has a sequel. The top image was shot almost a year ago and was taken with the Zeiss 50mm Sonnar 1.5. I think the color representation of that lens is evident in the image. That lens is just stellar and classic. The second image, the one at the bottom of this post, was taken with the Leica 50mm Summilux 1.4 ASPH, and I think the color signature of that lens is also amazingly evident in this shot.
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Getting back to some Leica photography. The date has been announced for the annual Fashion’s Night Out 2012 and it is September 6th.
Sooo… this entry today here at 50lux.com has a triple purpose.
First, I would like to give Leica and other lowlight shooters a heads-up to the coming FNO extravaganza, Vogue Magazine’s world-wide phenomena and to let you all know that this very impressive event is probably coming to a city somewhere near you.
It’s an incredible opportunity to get out and photograph great style and beauty and all in the vibrant colors and exact low-light conditions where our super-fast Leica glass really shows its stuff.
Second, of course, I want to showcase my own humble efforts in that regard from last year. All the images you see here were shot on film, with my trusty M7. Mostly with a Zeiss 50mm Sonnar f1.5 mounted, but there’s more than a few with the Leica 35mm Summicron 2.0 ASPH. Also shot mostly Kodak 800 Ultramax film but I also put a couple of rolls of TMAX 32oo through the M7 which I will post in a few days.
But now, and thirdly, I’m also going to turn my attention to a gentle constructive review of the event itself with the hope that this critique will find whomever might be in the organizing group planning this year’s festivities in Beverly Hills, where the FNO event I attended took place. You’ll get an idea of why I would want to get this into their hands if you read on.
Okay, right up front I should say that my attending last year’s Fashion’s Night Out in Beverly Hills event was for the sole purpose of shooting some frames of fast film with some even faster Leica and Zeiss glass mounted on my M7.
But I’m a critical sort. So in between trying to catch some of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen in my camera’s viewfinder, I did manage to cast a critical eye towards the event itself.
First, I think it’s a great idea. I’m a photographer. I love beauty and fashion. I have no connection, however, with the beauty or fashion industry as a photographer, or in any other way except as a admiring male who doesn’t leer from behind a camera.
Much. Come on, I am perfectly capable of taking a great picture of a beautiful woman without leering. In theory.
Anyway, I didn’t attend the event in 2010 so I have no reference point to compare 2011 with the previous year. But I was surprised at how little there was actually going on at this event on the very premier boulevard of shopping and fashion: Rodeo of Beverly Hills.
Leica M7, Zeiss 50mm Sonnar 1.5
Not to be overly critical, but I expected many small continuous fashion shows outside of some of the major trendy stores. A little more effort from the big fashion houses. An appreciable media presence. A few big names.
Pretty much nothing like that here. There was a set up for a fashion show, so maybe I was late. Got there at 8:00 and the event was scheduled till 10:00. Stores were pretty much an indoor thing, just like any other day. Except this was night.
There was a makeover area which was certainly busy. A street portrait artist working in charcoal, I believe. Food was supplied by a handful of not very interesting food trucks. People were lounging on the curb eating.
At one or two of the stores, there was an actual doorman allowing entry to only, I supposed, an invited few. Nice touch there as some pretty fancy Beverly Hills wives were turned away. Ouch. I have pictures of that.
I’m sorry, BH. I just think this is a great idea that should be done with a little more attention to class and detail and results. The number of people in attendance clearly demonstrated that there is an appetite for this type of event right there on Rodeo Drive.
Come on, Beverly Hills, you can do much MUCH better than this.
That said, please enjoy the pictures.
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Leica M7, Zeiss 50mm Sonnar f1.5, Kodak Ultra 800
LEICA M7, 35mm Summicron-M 2.0 ASPH
Leica M7, 35mm Sumicron 2.0 ASPH
Leica M7, Zeiss 50mm Sonnar f1.5
Click on these last two shots for larger versions.
Leica M7, Zeiss 50mm Sonnar f1.5
I have no thoughts to add to the wonderful quote by the Archbishop of Canterbury. 😉 Enjoy this post please from last year.
Viewers of Landscape
Each landscape is formed by the point of view of the spectator; it is a spiritual experience, the reflections of a culture. In a sense, therefore, the photographer first has to make a portrait of the people who muse over the landscape they behold. In thus placing himself behind them, he expresses both complicity with the natives and irony towards the invaders.
– Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1988
Magnum Landscapes
PHAIDON – 1996
Just felt like a timely thought… 😉
On the evening of August 11th, 1995, I met my best friend, Sheri. Remembering her today as well as expressing my endless gratitude for all the amazing gifts she provided to me in my life. Bernadette and I will always miss you and love you, Sheri!
Time for some writing, huh? This is one of my personal favorites from back in the day when I was covering the WNBA for my friend Sports Page Mike D’Avino. First published in 2009, it feels just right for a Throwback Thursday on 50.lux. (And my buddy Harold the TV cameraman is NOT a hater! He always looks like that!)
Women 102, Haters Zero
By Donald Barnat: SPM Associate Women’s Basketball Editor
Posted Thursday, June 4, 2009
Thirty-six years ago, a tennis match, hyped to the point where it became a cultural phenomena, drew a Super Bowl-sized primetime television audience estimated to be near 48 million.
The fascination surrounding The Battle of the Sexes was due to the fact that it pitted 55-year-old Robert Larimore Riggs, decades past being the world’s number one male tennis player but squarely in his prime as a crass and offensive self-promotion machine, against 29-year-old Billie Jean King, a woman who would methodically and mercilessly take the tired air out of Bobby Riggs’s lungs and remove it as well from the tired notion that never could a female, even one of the world’s most elite tennis players, beat even an adequate male counterpart.
The event, which took place at the Astrodome in Houston, brought in 30, 472 paying spectators — at the time the largest crowd ever to attend a tennis match. Play was preceded by a star-studded champagne reception and the entire affair had the air of an ancient gladiator-era spectacle as much as it did that of a modern professional sporting event.
Riggs was wheeled onto the court in a rickshaw that was drawn by five scantily clad women. King’s mode of transportation was no less ridiculous; she was borne by bare-chested male carrier-slaves on a golden divan, while men in the pricy front row seats held up signs printed with sexist taunts.
That was 36 years ago. This past Wednesday evening the WNBA sanctioned its own Battle of the Sexes, even boldly lifting that infamously iconic event title and emblazing it word-for-word across the front of the league’s website.
The WNBA, it seems, with its hopes for a brighter future stifled precariously in the economic doldrums of the present, had decided that, at least for one night, the time was ripe for some old-school hype.
It didn’t work, of course. No one save the most devoted of the league’s fans even noticed.
It was a half-hearted, almost tongue-in-cheek effort in terms of promotion, which was to be expected. The WNBA is, after all, an actual professional sports league, still closely attached to the NBA, heretofore stodgy, respectable in its own eyes, with scores of co-owners, investors and sponsors, many of whom would likely not be amused by an embarrassing and desperate marketing spectacle.
Too bad.
So there was no setting of the table of expectations with a media blitz brought to you by charismatic figures like Bobby Riggs. And, unlike the nationwide anticipation and exploitive spectacle that preceded American sport’s first modern Battle of the Sexes, even devoted followers of womens’ basketball seemed to be caught off guard by the last-minute announcement of the game on the league’s normally staid and altogether corporate-careful website.
The contest was clearly there on the WNBA preseason schedule, but that pretty much was the extent of the promotion prior to game day.
The facts are pretty straightforward. The WNBA’s Chicago Sky, a team that finished last season with 12 wins and 22 losses, a team that only 25% of the league’s GMs pick to even make the playoffs in 2009, was matched against the E-League All-Stars, a not-ready-for-primetime collection of singers, rappers, actors, comedians, all hailing from a basketball league made up of entertainers with real athletic skills and prowess where, it is said, real basketball is played in real games in a real league by, you guessed it, real men — most in their 20s and 30s and decades younger than Bobby Riggs was when he met his match back in 1973.
Whether a solitary soul tuned into the game or not, or whether or not (as of this writing it seems NOT) a single article would be written or published on the game itself, this contest, played as part of the Sky’s preseason schedule and according to league rules, was nevertheless a watershed moment for the WNBA, for women’s basketball, and for women’s sports as a whole.
Beset from its very beginnings by claims that any YMCA league team made up of lawyers and accountants, any rec-league team of ex-high school players, any junior high school boys team, in fact, any passable team at all of well-conditioned males who play basketball together regularly would surely wipe the floor with the best the women’s game has to offer, the WNBA is one American sports league with 12 long years worth of scores to settle.
The reality of what happened in the game itself can be described in a number of different ways. The score tells the story of emasculation in hard numbers. Chicago Sky 102, E-League All-Stars 55.
Another way of looking at it, and a personal favorite, is that guys with names like Tank and Flex got a beat down by players named Brooke and Kristi.
The guys played rough, and, as a result, their opponents often ended up splayed out on the hardwood. But the pro ballers gracefully picked themselves up, glided by their male opponents and not completely unlike what Billie Jean did to Bobby Riggs, the sleek and skilled females played circles around the brawny and befuddled men.
Overall the losers seemed to be good sports about their drubbing, taking their medicine, well, like men.
As of right now, no one is rubbing anyone’s noses in the dirt with taunts of I-told-you-so’s. But it’s hard to imagine that the WNBA’s decision-makers, newly emboldened and willing now, it seems, to embark on more flamboyant paths to recognition and profitability, could not see the potential in what just happened right before their eyes.
Both Bobby Riggs and Billy Jean King turned down offers to stage a rematch of their epically hyped battle and for both of them it was probably the right decision. Nobody really wanted to see a young woman beat an old man, all over again.
But the WNBA has never been remotely associated with anything that was even effectively hyped. It looks like they’re really trying now and they would be wise to dabble with the idea of staging and this time actively promoting another Battle of the Sexes.
And if they can just convince the men of the E-League All-Stars to show up once again to play them, they’ll have nothing to lose.
In Colorado. Get it? This is NOT L.A.! Okay. Just wanted to make sure. 😉
This is, I believe, Pikes Peak, the back view. It was, I can confirm, taken midmorning from a very high elevation in the beautiful Rocky Mountains overlooking the most gorgeous mountain lake. So the mountains you see don’t seem quite as high as the 14k foot range they are. What a trip! Many more pictures to follow in the coming days.
Our long national nightmare is over. Nixon has resigned. Wait a minute. No. We have moved after 25 years at our last residence.
It has been horrific. Like scraping moss off a rock. And we didn’t have a lot of time either. I won’t go into details. We could have ended up anywhere. I can’t tell you of the horrors we have seen for near $3000 a month. Rents in Los Angeles are outrageous. We had enjoyed 25 years of rent control. Our rent now will double.
As bad as that is, it wasn’t the worse thing by miles.
The worst thing, the thing that, quite honestly, at this stage of our lives, hit us like a terrible medical diagnosis, was that our happy lives might be over. I will tell you and you can believe me or not but the truth is our very happiness and futures were at stake. LA can now be just a brutally difficult place to live. So finding the right place, or not, was a process fraught with some of darkest concerns either of us have ever had.
Well. Fuck it all, that’s not how it turned out. Now we can breathe. We’re going to be fine. Somehow we found a place that is perfect for us. It has an incredible history which I will share at some other time. Right now, I’m writing this last night. Or something like that. You can probably see that my brain is fried. We haven’t actually moved until tomorrow. Wow. That’s not actually English either. Anyway. By the time this is published, we will be there. Or here. Whatever.
Here’s a shot from the 1950s. That’s LA in the salad days of Hollywood’s Film Noir era. Or I’m thinking Val Lewton. Foggy night. Shadows and trees rustling. 😉
40 years of love and happiness! Love you and let’s keep that smile on your face for another 40 and then some!
From the Reblogosphere …
Leica M9, Voigtlander 40mm f1.4 Nokton
THE REBLOGGING CONTINUES UNABATED! This from a few years ago.
Honestly, I’m not sure there’s two opposing camps out there. I think the way it usually goes is some poor unsuspecting chap says he likes to take pictures… and then, invariably, someone wearing a much more expensive watch says he doesn’t take pictures, he makes them.
Ah-HAH!
Then the first guy smiles and shrugs and says yes, of course, and then looks at his feet. The party’s over for him. He doesn’t even know what the other guy is talking about.
Make pictures? What does that even mean? What’s the difference between taking a picture and making one? Are they really two different things? How come I don’t know this?
The reason he might not know it is because there are so many instances in life where others hang onto information as if it’s a proprietary asset. Or, just as likely a theory, as long as I’m casting aspersions, they can’t really explain it themselves even if they wanted to because they themselves don’t know.
Ansel said it. That should be good enough for everyone. Right?
The truth is, making and taking a picture are really two different things. What the annoying snobby person (a recurring character on this blog) may not know is that, believe it or not, both are important approaches to photographing and it’s important to know the difference and to be able to execute on either at your discretion as a fairly decent photographer.
Simply put, you MAKE a picture when your eye selects a subject or scene and you can envision how you want that picture to appear in a photographic image and then you set about the business of positioning yourself and your camera, deciding areas under your control such as the aperture and how it will effect depth of field, for instance, as well as principles of composition or how you might use exposure, the balance of light and shadow, and an almost infinite number of other variables that will allow you to achieve the image that you’re envisioning as an end result.
Almost everything is riding on you. Your desired outcome will come about to your satisfaction only if you can execute and control the many decisions and results that represent your own vision for the image.
It’s an important basic concept to be aware of as a photographer and you can cement the processes involved in making images as opposed to taking them into your mind by repeated practice or application. After you’ve ‘made’ a half dozen great images of things as banal as the folds and polka dots on your shower curtain you’ll understand the concept of making an image as opposed to taking one.
But as you have probably already figured out, this is just one approach or thought process of photography and there certainly are countless instances where great photographers producing iconic images were not and are not engaging in anything approaching such a carefully thought-out creative process in the capturing of their images.
In fact, and apologies to Ansel Adams, I would suggest the vast majority of photography’s most famous, memorable, or iconic images were not made in the sense that they were envisioned, preconceived, thought about, prepared or set up for, or any of the many actions that a creative photographer might go through in an effort to make an image.
This is probably best explained with a picture, which is, the last time I bothered to check, still not really worth a thousand words.
Sao Paulo, Brazil. 2006. Women’s World Championship of Basketball.
Team USA has just lost a game in international competition for the first time in 14 years. Since international amateur athletic bodies that govern things like world championships and the Olympics changed the rules that prohibited professional athletes from participating, allowing for the creation of ‘dream teams’ made up of the best professional players in a given sport, the United States had dominated the world in women’s basketball.
But the scrappy (and photogenic) team from Russia found a way to do what no one believed even possible; literally beat the Americans at their own game.
So a bunch of baseline photographers are under the far basket after the historic loss. Some of us, the Americans I’m guessing, are shocked and more than a little bit angry. We all came a long way to shoot the United States winning a world championship.
We’re all looking around in confusion and as the Russian post-game celebration extends beyond a polite 30 seconds or so, it seemed that most of us had gotten all the shots we needed of this sacrilegious demonstration and we’d gone back to mostly arguing about who screwed the pooch harder, the US players or coaches.
After a while, in any group or pool of photographers covering an event, there’s this group-think that seems to occur. We all know what we’re there to get, and I think some of us can get a little self conscious if we’re the last photographer still grinding away at our shutter’s life expectancy at eight frames per second shooting at essentially the same scene. You don’t really want to be that guy. What is that clown doing? You mean you haven’t gotten one in focus YET?
But then I saw something. Something was added to the scene. Instinctively I raised my Nikon D3 with the 70-200mm f2.8 Nikkor VR mounted and took this shot.
Nikon D3, 70-200mm f2.8 Nikkor VR
I will tell you without question that it is my firm opinion that if women’s basketball and the exploits of our US national team in international ball were a big deal in this country, as big of a deal as say, NBA basketball is in America, then this image would have been an iconic capture.
It’s Diana Taurasi, then and probably now the best women’s player in the world, dejectedly walking by as the ecstatic Russians carry on the celebration of their incredible upset of a team made up of the best professional and amateur women ballers our country could produce. Something that hadn’t happened, as I pointed out earlier, in 14 years.
I know you could argue that I somehow made that image, and that’s fine. My mind recognized the opportunity and blah, blah, blah. Yes, I was prepared to shoot that moment. But we’re all as photographers in a constant state of preparation.
The truth is, I took that shot. And the further truth is, I seek to take shots a lot more than I set out to make shots.
I wrote this article because I think I understand the difference between the two and can explain it. I also wrote it because I’d like to change as a photographer. I can take shots. I’m very good at it and I want to continue taking them whenever the opportunity arises.
But I want to spend a lot more time in the future of my photography making images. This blog entry will be, I hope, a major step forward for me to focus my attention onto an approach to photography that I’ve often neglected.
You don’t really know something, it is said, unless you can explain it to others. And I sincerely hope this piece is as helpful to me as it might be to anyone reading it.
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P.S Here’s another women’s basketball shot that this time I apparently, in spite of myself, somehow managed to make.
P.P.S. This article was originally published here on 50lux.com June 10th, 2012. I could (and probably should) just reblog these old articles, but they don’t display quite the way I would like them to so I don’t. I guess I don’t quite see the harm in doing it this way.
Nikon D3, 24-70mm f2.8 Nikkor
Some of the images in this post were made with a Leica M7 and Fujifilm 400 and some were made with a Leica M-E. This isn’t a test or a game. They’re just so wonderfully close and that result is so typical of the M-E that I thought I’d sweeten this news with a graphic demonstration of why I’m so happy with the Leica M-E and the news that follows.
Incredibly excited beyond any words today to hear this. Please click on the link at the bottom to the great Leica News & Rumors blog for more info.
But I have to say, one reason I’m so happy to hear this is that I can now really open up about how happy I am with the Leica M-E. And the selfish reason I didn’t do that to the extent that I wanted to is because my understanding is that Leica was discontinuing…
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Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills 2015 – 50lux.com © 2015
VIA americansuburbx.com:
note: americansuburbx.com is really IMO the greatest photography website on the planet. can’t even describe what it has meant to me over the years. fascinated by the ideas presented by in this article and thought i would share them here.
ATEM is something of a cold tome where the images are used as a fleeting embrace or collation of imagery that flickers in and out of the creator’s intent in so much as he does not seem to have one cohesive interest in their distribution. This is very much why the book is a success. It is to use photographs for what they really are, non-representational epitaphs of moments rendered in silver with little meaning when consumed in great amounts by second or third parties. The book is filled with images. It has a DIY aesthetic by design and covertly bargains with the viewer to NOT make a narrative from their collective assembly. This speaks more truth within photography than do a large number of other books currently being published under that age-old headache of “series”.
via Massimilio T. Rezza’s ‘ATEM’: The Art of Images Without Meaning | ASX.
This is a very different picture of people in a car than probably anything else I’ve ever captured. In many ways.
When I saw it and shot it, I didn’t really expect that it would have the glow that popped up on my D3’s LCD. But sometimes light and a piece of glass like the legendary 85mm 1.4 Nikkor D combine to create something that goes beyond what we could reasonably hope for when we snap that shutter.
It is of a place and of a people. California, and Cali-fuckin’-fornians. There they are. I got them and I’ve brought them here to show you all, like pretty tropical birds in a zoo. Only, in this case, it’s just an old T-Bird, but whatever.
That’s the stereotype right there. Straight blond hair that’s sun and saltwater bleached to go with that classic black California license plate. But of course!
You know they’re a handsome family. Well to do. You don’t eccentrically teeter around Los Angeles in a glorious old 60s tanker sporting the original paint job that YOU know looks way cooler than any redo ever could unless you have the wherewithal to maintain that level of quirk. And quirk it is.
The irony is how rarely these kinds of California residents pop up into a person’s field of view in Los Angeles. The truth about LA is there are more brown-haired, brown-eyed, brown-skinned people here than there are stereotypical California blondes. But that’s for another conversation.
In amongst the Lexuses and Hundais and preppy BMW drivers, here are the quintessential eccentric Southern Californians.
Grandpa looks like Lex Barker from the Tarzan movies. The girls look like Kate Moss. They were eating Goji berries in the Amazon rainforest 20 years before the rest of the world even heard of them. They have a cliff house in Malibu Canyon and mom had an affair with the Dalai Llama.
I’m kidding of course! I don’t know these people!!! Have a nice Tuesday!
A reblog from last summer. Hoping for similar news to report in a few weeks as the second LACP juried member’s exhibition images are selected.
Very excited to learn that the above image, Gestalt Moment, won a spot in the Los Angeles Center for Photography’s first Juried Member’s Exhibition that will run from July 11 – August 12. Over 800 images were submitted and 50 were selected.
I set out to do a number of things in terms of street photography when I embark into the city to make my images. I don’t go out with a single project in mind but after so many years of shooting in Los Angeles I know there are a number of things on the spectrum of possibilities that I can hope to find and document.
This image actually represents a number of those things. First and foremost I think what my photography is about is that it’s psychological. That’s certainly a matter of perception and right or wrong, true or false, I attempt to make images of that…
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50'Lux 