thanks Joe. in the interest of full disclosure, i am shooting a few other cameras and lenses, but so it's a "mostly leica year". but, the overall goal of spending a lot of time with B&W film and a fast 50 is animating most of my activity.
dear diary... i realize i'm somewhat behind.
i left off before posting about my graffiti night. so, there i was, on a quiet summer saturday night, determined to go out and photograph something. austin at night in the summer is kind of an interesting place. most of all, it's not austin in the day in the summer, which means the sun isn't out and people can bear to be outside. so, out they come. austin's also an easy place to get around. san francisco, where i lived before moving to austin isn't exactly easy to get around (or, at least it's not now... once, and not so long ago, it was). new york, where i lived before that, is easy due to the great public transport system, though distances can be somewhat de-motivating.
i figured i'd get in the car and drive around until i found something fun. for night shooting, that usually means i end up on austin's mile-long open drinking area, sixth street, but this night i went east.
geographical aside... now, technically, for those of you familiar with austin, i was still on or around sixth street, but the character of the street changes once you go under I-35 onto austin's east side. west of 35, sixth street is blocked off from congress to 35, and the closed-street character has leaked out past congress even farther west to lamar. although congress is austin's geographical east/west divider, 35 is the real east/west boundary. the east side is the poor side of town, but it's gentrifying. "sixth street" is a big party street, full of college kids and post-college revelers. "east sixth street" is a lot more bohemian. it takes a little more work to find a party but maybe not too much. on the night in question, i drove around until i heard music, and then quickly parked.
i found a big warehousey place with sound and light. it's a great location, with a little warren of buildings and trees and yards. there's a farmers' market there on sundays and they do a SXSW event during the festival. on this night, they had a graffiti art show and break dancing competition.
now, you got to understand, i'm 49 years old, and i grew up in graffiti-filled new york (n.b., i have no personal history of any significance as a graffiti writer or a break dancer). jean-michel basquiat wrote SAMO on the walls of my high school, i rode the train every day into manhattan never knowing what kind of riot of color i'd see on the cars, and i got to see the early days of hip-hop expand out of boroughs and into lower manhattan's more public view. so, i was curious, and had a nostalgic rather than an ironic point of view.
of course, in the old days (i can't bring myself to say "back in the day" without smirking), we didn't have quite this much space and quite this many leaves outside the nighttime establishments...
so, it's a big open warehouse space, where the organizers had set up a bunch of different spaces. the air stunk of spray paint, and there were a couple of guys at work on big canvases. there were a lot of paintings up on walls (for sale, and for display) and they had set up a big hard-plastic mat for breakdancing, with stage for the DJ and MC. that part of the space was absolutely packed, and absolutely rockin.
i took my m5 to shoot with, and my summicron 40. the m5 is great for this sort of thing due to the vertical-hang lugs. sits quietly at your side, and then WHOOP right up for a shot, then right back. i thought the 40 (which is a wonderful little lens) would be wide enough without being too wide. in retrospect, i wish i'd brought a 50 and then a 28. a lot of my shots ended up being cropped, and there were a bunch of things i didn't shoot because i didn't have enough FOV. i would also have liked the extra stop from a 50/1.4 or 1.5. it was dark enough inside that i ended up shooting a lot at 1/60 or even 1/30 and f2. i got a lot of action blur at those speeds. maybe next time, i'll remember that i can push film.
