Fall is hard

Wherein I struggle with taking pictures when things are dying

Leica M262 + Leica Elmar 50/2.8

I’m a spring and summer guy when it comes to photographs. Basically as soon as the world starts to die around me my inspiration levels start to tank. I get that it’s an incredibly beautiful time of year, and I enjoy walking in the woods and taking in the changing season but when it comes to turning my camera toward it I tend to just feel, “Eh,” about the whole thing. Something about the fecundity of spring and summer, the Hildegardian “viriditas” that flows through everything is so apparent and so beautiful to photograph. I struggle with the slumber of the world, or something like that.

The leaves fall off the trees and they’re reduced to these decrepit, spindly twigs without fullness or life. And before long this white stuff starts to fall from the sky and blankets everything in white, reducing the vitality and richness of things to hues of brown and sheets of white. And again, I can appreciate it in the context of a lived experience I just struggle to translate it in to photos. All of this really just means that I need to get out in it more and shoot more and figure out how to take those experiences and make them in to photographs. It’s an interesting albeit maddening challenge.

Jess has brought up the idea of a body of work that photographs a certain number of subjects throughout various times of the year to document the changing seasons. I think something like that would be a good way of adding context or meaning to photographs I kind of otherwise would struggle to make. So that could be cool. Either way it’s an interesting season to struggle through for me but I’m trying to push through it this season instead of just shrugging and hanging up the camera for 5 months until the spring come around again.

New habits, or, a walk with the Elmar

Wherein the family takes a walk, again

Expertly styled legs | Leica M262 + Leica Elmar 50/2.8

Sometimes I’m unsure of how to start these things and even less sure of what to fill up the body of text with. These posts are really just a way for me to post work in a format that’s not some shitty social media platform and the blog format seems to call for at least some kind of wordular content. So I seem compelled to fill it with platitudes, small talk about what I’ve been up to, meandering pontification about themes-photographic that most people aren’t really going to care about. I sometimes wonder if I should just stop posting these smaller update/gallery blogs and just use the blog posts for larger pieces of writing. What do y’all think?

Now that I’ve got the crushing weight of that admission off my chest, I can get to filling this space with words. Jess and I seem to have settled in to a fun new habit of talking off on little “photo walks” through the neighborhood in the afternoon/evenings after we do our best to wear out Ruckus in the front yard. It’s been nice, and both of us enjoy going out and making photos together and then coming back to the house and uploading them and going through them together. She always takes the Canon 6D with the 28-70 zoom and I always grab the M262, usually with a 50 thrown on the front or some other focal length to experiment with if I have some wild hare you know where. Today was the Elmar, which is kind of becoming my go-to 50mm for reasons I’ve gone on and on about many times here.

You may have also noticed (actually, if you didn’t I’m concerned about you) that this is yet another post in which I’ve done exclusively black and white photos. Don’t read in to it. I’m not reverting back to old ways. Or maybe I am. I am just a leaf adrift atop the flows of an undulating river.

Fall walks in monochrome

Walking and shooting a 50, shooting black and white

Leica M262 + Leica 50/2.8 Elmar

Today was a pretty good day. We started off with a trip over to my grandparents for breakfast, some homemade biscuits and gravy over some good conversation. Then we ran some errands around town on the way home from my grandparents. Once we got home we had the requisite activity time in the front yard with Ruckus before taking him on a walk. I had grabbed the Leica quickly before we set off on a short walk with Ruckus and Jess had made the comment while we were walking that she’d wished she’d also grabbed a camera before we left. So when we got back she grabbed the Canon 6D and we set out again for a walk around the neighborhood. I took the Leica and the 50mm Elmar again.

I’ve been shooting color pretty much exclusively now for a couple months if not longer but for shits and giggles today I decided to set the JPEG preview function on the Leica to black and white and just go out with the intention of shooting monochrome from start to finish. I’ve hit a weird point lately with color vs monochrome imagery. When I try to process images in black and white I just look at the work and it feels empty and lifeless in monochrome, like something essential is missing. I hear you saying, “Uh, yeah. It’s the color…” And that’s obviously part of it. But it’s also started to feel like color has unlocked something in my work that the black and white stuff just hasn’t/doesn’t fully express. I’m not sure how else to say it in any more detail than that because I don’t fully understand what’s happening.

Having said that, this was the first set of monochrome images I’ve made in a while that actually felt like they weren’t missing that weird esoteric something. I’m willing to chalk up a lot of the legwork on that to the Leica Elmar. That lens is always able to render things in such a beautiful way in black and white. It works beautifully in color too but it really sings in black and white images. Something about that old optical design and older coatings that produces such a beautiful range of grays in black and white that give the images such a rich nuance of tones. All this to say I was actually pretty surprised to get home and start working on the photos and find that I ended up keeping all of them in black and white instead of processing them as color photos. Is my color stint over? Eh, probably not. I still really enjoy shooting in color and I’m still trying to plumb the depths of this weird intangible things that my color work seems to be getting at that feels missing in much of the monochrome work I’d done/continue to do. We press on.

We actually ended up going on another walk later in the evening. We were washing one of the cars and Jess made the comment that the light was prettier in the evening than when we’d gone on the first walk and so I said that we should take another walk. She went and grabbed the Canon again and I opted for the Leica again but threw on the 28mm for fun before leaving the house. It was fun to shoot with the external finder and zone focused but I much preferred the results from the 50mm lens. Shocking, the self professed 50mm guy liked the 50mm. Anyways, if you’re reading this thanks for taking a look!