A walk around Irvington – Sambal

by Posted in Buildings/Structures, Film, Minolta MD Rokkor-x 50mm f1.7 Leave a comment
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I started my walk here, down by the waterfront because it was here that my wife was meeting a friend for lunch.

According to its website:

Chef Navjot’s romance with South East Asian Cusine was rekindled when he travelled this past year to Thailand , Singapore and Malaysia. Spending weeks, immersed in authentic Asian gastronomy invigorated and excited him and he wanted to share his intriguing culinary experiences with people back home, and not only food but he has an experience background in cocktail making so he is sharing all of it with the world to inspire all. If you want to create a home bar like this you need the essential bar tools to make a great job like the Chef Navjot’s.

Having seen the people of Irvington enjoy a bold and vibrant Indian Cuisine for the past 8 years, he felt confident that they would be an eager participant in his dream to introduce the intricate flavours of South-East Asian cuisine in this dynamic Westchester community. Thus, Sambal was conceived.

From womb to the world, this dream was realised with the help of Sushil Malhotra, Chef Arora’s partner, mentor and guide. The feather in our cap is our collaboration with Chef Lucky Thai. She is an award winning maestro of Asian cooking, previously based in Las Vegas, who is at the helm of our kitchen along with Chef Navjot. Their combined expertise will ensure that we stay true to our roots as an Asian dining experience while continuing to create and innovate.

…

We bring you the freshest organic ingredients, exotic herbs and spices from Thailand and Malaysia. The cooking process combines the high heat of the wok with constant agitation to create flavors and textures that are crisp, sharp yet complex. The fragrant and aromatic cuisine in a sophisticated, elegant ambience helps us assure that you have a memorable dining experience.

This building has not always housed Sambal. Until a couple of years ago it was a good Indian restaurant called Chutney Masala. Luckily that restaurant, which has the same owners as Sambal, moved to a different location on Main Street in Irvington and Sambal took its place on the waterfront.

I’ve eaten at Chutney Masala many times, but never at Sambal so I can’t comment on the food.

Taken with a Minolta XD and Minolta MD Rokkor-X 50mm f1.7.

A Birthday Present

by Posted in Flowers, Nature, Sigma 400mm f5.6, Statues, Things, Wildlife & Animals Leave a comment

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In an earlier post (See: Croton Landing – Killdeer) I expressed an interest (with some reservations) about trying bird photography:

I’m quite interested in wildlife photography, but I’ve always shied away from it. There are a couple of reasons for this. First I lack the patience. Second I don’t really have the right “gear”. While I would normally make the point the “gear” shouldn’t matter that much in this case I think it does. It seems to me that without a very long and fast telephone lens taking pictures of distant animals is very difficult. And acquiring such a lens seems to be very expensive. This picture was taken at the entirely inadequate 70mm equivalent maximum zoom of the Sony RX-100. It was then heavily cropped.

Still it did stimulate my interest. Maybe I’ll see if I can find an old Minolta AF lens at a reasonable price. Then I’ll only have to come to terms with the “lack of patience” issue. It might be a good challenge.

In pursuit of this goal my wife bought me this lens for my birthday. It’s a Sigma 400mm f5.6.

I realized that it wouldn’t be a good lens in low/dull light and when it arrived we were going through a period of gloomy, rainy days so I decided to wait for a sunny day to try it out. Unfortunately, there were no birds around so I did a few test shots around our garden.

It’s quite a solid lens, but at the same time not all that heavy (all of the pictures in this post were hand held). As many of the reviews I’d read pointed out it’s really an f8 lens as anything wider than that suffers from lack of sharpness. All of the pictures here were taken at f8 or smaller. It also has really bad chromatic aberration, which thankfully can be corrected fairly easily in Lightroom.

It has a built in lens shade and a sliding cover over the manual focus ring (so you don’t damage the lens by trying to manually focus the lens when the camera is in autofocus mode I imagine). It also has it’s own tripod mount. Mine also came with a polarizing filter.

I’d read that there might be compatibility problems with modern Sony cameras, but I didn’t have any problems with my Sony A77II. I’d also read that had been problems related to stripping the gears on the autofocus motor so, as advised in the articles I’d read I set the AF drive speed to slow. So far so good.

All things considered I was quite pleased (particularly since it was my first attempt with this lens). The results were better than I’d thought they would be. Now to find some birds.

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Blossoms on one of our trees.
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Newly acquired garden statue.
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Our dog Harley.
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A garden ornament.
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Another garden statue. We’ve had this one for decades.
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A tulip.

smc pentax-f 35-70mm f3.5-4.5

by Posted in Flowers, Nature, smc pentax-f 35-70mm f3.5-4.5 Leave a comment
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This is the second of the lenses that came with my ill-fated acquisition of two Pentax autofocus film bodies (See : Tamron AF Aspherical LD 28-200mm f3.8-5.6).

I rather like it. It’s small, light and pretty sharp throughout. Like the Tamron it’s a bit ‘plasticky’, but still feels well made and reliable. I found the colors to bit a bit flat, but nothing that a little extra contrast and saturation couldn’t cure

The zoom range is a little awkward. Because of the crop factor it’s around 52-105mm so you completely lose the wide end. The tele end provides a useful range for portraits though.

It’s not the fastest lens I’ve ever come across, but then again it’s far from being the slowest too. Autofocus is reputed to be good, but since I’ve only used manual focus (on a Sony NEX 5n) I’m unable to comment.

When I was editing the pictures I realized that something was different. At first I didn’t know what it was, but after a while I figured out that for some reason I’d set the camera for jpg rather than RAW (which is what I always use). It was now too late to do anything about it (I wasn’t going to go back and take all the pictures again) so I’ll just have to live with the lack of flexibility that comes from editing jpegs.

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For more pictures taken with this lens see:

Picture of lens taken with a Sony A77 II and Tamron A18 AF 18-250mm f3.5-6.3. Pictures of flowers taken with smc pentax-f 35-70mm f3.5-4.5 on a Sony NEX 5n.

Tamron AF Aspherical LD 28-200mm f3.8-5.6

by Posted in Flowers, Nature, Tamron AF Aspherical LD 28-200mm f3.8-5.6 Leave a comment
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In an earlier post (See: A couple of Pentax autofocus SLRs) I mentioned that I had acquired a couple of inexpensive Pentax AF SLRs with lenses. The bodies were pretty much dead on arrival, but it seemed to me that the lenses were in working condition.

I was right: both of the lenses work fine. This is the first of them. I’m unable to comment on the lenses autofocus performance as I used it on a Sony NEX 5N where only manual focus was possible. Maybe in the future I’ll try it out on my one and only Pentax AF film body

It’s a typical superzoom lens. It has a useful range (28-200mm), although less useful than it might be on a crop sensor where it becomes a 35mm equivalent of around 42-300mm. You gain on the tele end, but pretty much lose all wide-angle capabilities.

It’s a bit ‘plasticky’, but nonetheless feels solid and well made. It’s fairly small and light for this kind of lens. The zoom lens on mine was a little stiff, but not too bad. With use it will probably loosen up. There’s something about the manual focus ring that I like though. I don’t know why.

Image quality if pretty much what you’d expect from a lens of this type. It’s fairly soft wide open (particularly so at the long end) but improves when you stop down and by f8 it’s OK. The lens tends to flare quite a lot when pointed towards a light source so a lens hood it definitely in order. The lens originally came with a hood, but my second hand copy didn’t include it. There’s a lot of chromatic aberration and both pincushion and barrel distortion at various points of the zoom range. Contrast seemed a little low and the colors seemed a little muted. Most of the above can easily be corrected in post production however. I shoot everything in RAW so I have to edit my pictures in any case.

Providing your expectations are not too high this is a decent enough lens. Of course to pack such a long zoom range into such a small, lightweight package requires significant compromises. What you gain in terms of convenience and ease of use you lose in terms of image quality. If you can accept these compromises then you’ll probably like this lens. If you can’t then you certainly won’t.

For me I quite like it. I spend quite a lot of my time walking the dog in the woods around where I live. For these walks I much prefer to have a single superzoom lens than to have to carry around a multitude of single focal length or shorter zoom lenses.

Below a picture shot using this lens of a lily in our garden.

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For more pictures taken with this lens see:

Taken with a Sony Nex 5N and Tamron AF Aspherical LD 28-200 f3.8-5.6