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.