I’ve been working on my website this year and I think I’ve made pretty good progress.  I launched the new site today and ran into a problem, I don’t have any pictures of myself.  You see I got my first camera at 7yrs old and that was pretty much the last time I was ever in a photo.  Sure I’ve got school portraits and formals but those don’t really count.  I guess that’s the problem with being behind the camera, you never really get any time in front of it.

Next time I go photowalking with a group I’m going to get someone (I’m looking at you two Gabe and Michael) to take my picture…

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In the last week I’ve realized something… making frame worth sharing (or even something interesting) everyday is hard work, much harder than I thought.  I do have frames from everyday this past week but most of them are, what’s the word? Oh ya, “Crap” as in a waste of pixels.  Sure I learned something in the process and perhaps that alone made the weeks’ photos worthwhile, but the whole process has been very discouraging. Looking for a bit of encouragement I emailed a better shooter and asked for his advice, his response was brief: “Did you read [Joe] McNally’s post on Sept 10?”. So off to McNally’s site I went and read the Sept 10 post, and it was like he was speaking directly to me (you can read it here) and I’ll save you the trouble of figuring out what part spoke to me:

…Cause this is hard to do, right? Day after day, you come back without a great or even good frame. I’m reminded of the conversation betweeen Tom Hanks and Geena Davis in League of Their Own.

Jimmy Dugam: “Baseball is what gets inside you, it’s what lights you up. You can’t deny that.”
Dottie: “It just got too hard.”
Jimmy: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great.”

There’s a lot of analogies between photography and baseball. Ray Fitzgerald of the Boston Globe wrote, “A critic once characterized baseball as six minutes of action crammed into two-and-one-half hours.”

Sounds like a photo shoot to me.

So I’m picking up my camera and getting back to work, not because it’s easy (well sometimes it is) but because it’s hard and like Jimmy said “it’s the hard that makes it great”.

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Leica is about to announce a 50mm f/0.95 prime for their M mount bodies and it will set you back a whopping $11,000 USD. This may be the fastest commercially available lens ever made. Read about it here.

Now I know $11k isn’t all that outrageous for a lens, after all serious nature/sports shooters routinely carry around 600mm f/4 glass that retails in the $8-$10k range.  But we’re not talking about some exotic, 11lb, super-tele f/4 here, this is 50mm of pocket friendly f/0.95 goodness.  That’s a full stop faster than your pokey 50mm f/1.4, this is handheld candlelit photos at base ISO territory.  Imagine the razor thin depth of field with this lens wide open… I’m imagining eyelashes in focus/pupils are soft and blurry.

…eyeing the piggy-bank and thinking ‘where did I put that hammer?’…

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