Photographs and thoughts on photography and camera collecting
My memory tells me that these two pictures were taken on the same day, but the metadata associated with them seems contradict this – making them two days apart. The picture above was taken from the front door of our house in Briarcliff Manor. The second one (below) was taken from a friend’s appartment in the Manhattan.
They were both taken in December 2011 with a small sensor Panasonic Lumix ZS7 so the technical image quality is not all it might be.
We had about six/seven inches of snow yesterday and were sitting in the living room reading when we noticed movement on the lake. Four people were walking their dogs on the lake. The falling snow did not seem to bother them very much and the dogs seemed to be loving it. By the time we noticed them they were already walking out of view so I was very aware that if I wanted a picture I’d have to act quickly. So I grabbed the nearest camera (Sony RX100) and dashed outside – which was a bit unfortunate as we have more that two feet of snow on the patio and I only had socks on my feet. I managed to get off a couple of shots before they disappeared behind the trees. This inspired me to take our own dog for a one hour walk in the falling snow. I only fell once too – very gratefully and with no damage.
I recently read a blog post, which posed the question: “Why do you blog?” and it made me think about my reasons for blogging.
The first point to be made is that I do it for myself. I imagine that I could get usage statistics, but I don’t bother to look. I suspect that very few people read my blog and that’s fine with me. So why do I blog?
First – I originally started to blog to force me to get out and take pictures. All of my reading and advice from other photographers suggested that you have to do this in order to improve. I’m fundamentally quite lazy and tend to find excuses not to go and shoot. I thought that starting a blog would give me a reason to go and take pictures. So far it’s worked. I now take many more pictures than I did before and I can see a slight improvement over time.
Second – it provides me with a record of what I’m doing. It’s a bit like having a diary. I can look back and see where I was and what I was doing two years ago, for example. I’m a fan of mysteries and inevitably a police officer asks the suspect what he/she was doing on the night of such and such. I’ve often wondered how I would answer such a question since I can’t generally remember what I’ve being doing. With the blog I can just check the appropriate date and there’s a good chance that this will point me in the right direction.
Third – Very few of my posts are thoughtful. They’re mostly just a picture and some text. Sometimes, however, I’m prompted to put some ideas forward and the blog is a useful vehicle for capturing them.
Fourth – The blog is a useful place to record links to things I’ve found on the internet that I found particularly interesting.
Fifth – The blog gives me the opportunity to combine two of my favorite pastimes: photography and history. I like nothing more that finding an old, interesting building; taking some pictures of it; then doing some research into its origins and history and combining the lot into a blog post.
I was walking back from the Parker Bale Post 1597 to the FOE Ossining Aerie 1545 where I had left my car when I noticed these two wooden sculptures apparently carved from trees by the side of the road. I almost missed them. I’m not so wild about the owl but the head is pretty spectacular.
If so then you’ll like this site:
It contains post after post of quite detailed instructions on how to adapt sometimes quite arcane lenses to a variety of cameras – although the focus seems to be on the Sony E mount. It goes far beyond just buying an off the shelf adapter (as I have done in the past) and into specifics of taking apart lenses and rigging up your own adapter. The author takes old lenses, cuts bits off, drills holes, glues stuff together and … voila… an adapter that lets you use a Koristka Salex Anastigmat 5 2/5 Inch f4.5 with your Sony Alpha Nex A7. Almost all of the posts provide images produced by the adapted lens/camera combination to show you what kind of results you can expect.
Fascinating stuff! I wish I had the nerve (and the mechanical skills) to try some of this. Must be very fulfilling to get an ancient lens (that probably nobody wants any more) to work work with a state of the art camera body.