This capture was made a [sarcasm] few minutes ago [/sarcasm]. I actually made the capture about a year ago. I was playing with a Russian lens, my copy of the Industar 55mm f/2.8, which is a copy of a Zeiss lens.
There are a number of these inexpensive Russian lenses that produce very nice/interesting images. Therefore, I have a few in my inventory.
This morning was my morning to get out the new (to me) Jupiter 8 50mm f/2 lens I recently acquired. I affixed it to the Sony A7S (Mark I) and carried it with me when I got The Girl out for walkies.
I made several shots along the route and there are probably a couple more that are worth looking at a little more. However, after our walk I drove over to the east side of the Carson River and got The Girl out over there for a few minutes. I wanted to see the river.
This capture is alright, I think. It took a little adjustment to bring up the colors a bit. The contrast also needed some adjustment as it was a little flat. But I like the image.
I need to work with the lens more. It seems a little soft wide open, but has interesting bokeh wide open. It sharpens up by f/5.6 although the bokeh is lost.
I think the Industar 61 might be a better lens.
A few weeks ago I bought two lenses, both are Russian copies of Zeiss optical formulas. They came from Ukraine (lots of them there) from a reputable seller. I had to order a pair of Leica mount (39mm) to Sony FE and Fuji FX mounts so I can mount these on my cameras.
This first image is of my Girl after I fed her this morning. She patiently posed for me on the sofa while I played around with the Sony A7S (Mark I) and an Industar 55mm f/2.8. I finally settled on an f-stop of f/5.6 and bumped the ISO up to 6,400 to get the shutter speed up.
I downloaded the images to my iMac and used Iridient Developer to convert the out of camera JPEG to black and white. I made a small contrast adjustment and added a bit of sharpening to the result as well.
I like the image… and not just because of the subject matter. The lens is quite sharp at f/5.6 and has good contrast. I think this lens is a keeper.
In the evening of Christmas Day, Sera needed to go out before we hit the rack. I bought a Sony A7S (first generation) a month or so ago for use as a low-light camera. This Sony model (the A7S and its progenitors) is considered the queen of the low-light cameras. The 12.1MP sensor resolution is fine for most of what I do, plus does not take up so much disk space on the computer and its backup drives.
Work kept me from doing much with the camera and will for awhile yet. But I wanted to do some test shots. So I took it into the backyard with us, with a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 mounted to the camera. (Yes, that is a legacy manual focus lens.) I set the ISO to 25k and made a few captures of Sera playing in the snow.
I like this one the best of the lot. There’s a lot of detail in the image. I am impressed.
This week I continued working on my review of 2021. What I came away with is that of the things I should do, my self-care suffered in favor of the work. The work is good too, but I really need to spend some time every day working on myself, including the physical, mental, and spiritual aspects.
Work continues to keep me busy. In fact, I intended to publish this on Christmas, but here we are more than a week later.
Sera and I are walking and enjoying each other quite a lot. She loves our daily walks and the time to work off-lead. I require her to check in every minute or two and do not like her to be out of sight for long. There are coyotes in the field and she would think they were like domestic canines. That could be bad.
Happy New Year, all.
A favorite IG’er, @NateArizona, posted a chat on IG recently and talked about this. It made me think (or rethink) my use of social media, particularly FB, IG, Twitter, and SnapChat.
I’m not a big user of any of them, with the exception of IG. But I limit my exposure to IG in that I follow only a few posters and they are either family, friends, or a few photographers whose work I admire. I mostly post to IG, but am unsure that results in any additional traffic here, to my weblog.
I do not receive any meaningful feedback from my posts on IG. I am pretty serious about photography and work every year to improve my sight and my skills. I post a few captures on IG because it’s quick and I enjoy it. But I have only a couple hundred followers.
Therefore, I question whether it is worth the effort to continue the IG exercise or to refocus that energy to working here on my personal webspace. Perhaps I should think about my goals for IG and how those goals fit into my goals for this website. If my photographs are print-worthy, then I could generate some income to offset the cost of equipment and travel to make more captures of interesting places, people, and things.
But, I digress in my stream-of-consciousness fashion. I was really thinking about the social media addiction (a dopamine hit addiction) that so many of us suffer. I followed FB pretty closely for awhile, before a writer I admire referred to it as “an exercise in abnormal psychology.” That captured my attention, along with reading about Fear-Of-Missing-Out (AKA FOMO) and I realized that I was really missing very little, with few exceptions. Avoiding FB resulted in an immediate drop in frustration level (and probably blood pressure) from all that mess.
When FB bought IG I was deeply concerned. I loved the way my follows showed up in the feed when I checked in. I could quickly and easily determine what was new and have a look at the work of creatives I enjoy. When FB abandoned the chronological feed for something far more obscure I was deeply disappointed. Now they are becoming more adamant about showing me feeds that I might like and sponsored posts that want me to buy something. It is becoming unbearable.
The last couple of major elections reinforced my thoughts when I saw how nasty people were on FB. It was a moment when I eschewed the platform, for the most part, only visiting now and again after posting something here to see if I had comments that needed response.
(For the record, I also keep track of a few family members and very close friends there.)
So where does this leave my thoughts? Well, I will continue to use the social media platforms on my current list. I might move much of my photographic work here and post less on IG. I will certainly maintain my distance from FB as that problem of psychology I mentioned. Twitter and SnapChat are not big consumers of my time and energy, so there really isn’t much to do there.
And then there is Ello1. I have an account there I do not use much. There are many creatives on Ello. But I do not really grok the platform. Perhaps Ello deserves a little more attention as far as posting my images and some supporting text. If one of my goals is to reach a wider audience with my photographs and my words, then that might be an approach. It is clear that neither IG nor FB is a viable solution. They are both crowded spaces and the algorithms are not intended to provide creators with outreach; the algorithms are intended to keep users hooked and increase revenues. That sounds cynical, but it is what I believe.
It seems I have some additional work to do. But perhaps I better get The Girl out and make a capture for today. I am certain I can find something to catch my eye….
1Dead link… removed.