James. With an old 50mm on the front of his A7riii.
My very first "real" camera was the now cultish Canonet QL17 which I still have in my filing cabinet, just in case digital goes out of style and we get to revert to photography the way God intended it to be.
I was thinking about this today as I post processed a location portrait I made yesterday. The most used focal length on my zoom lens yesterday? About 50mm..... I should have left the zoom at home and just taken along the 45mm f2.8 (I was shooting with the Lumix S1).
in other notes: I'm getting excited about the Dia De Los Muertos parade coming up here in Austin on Saturday. Seems some of my photographer friends are already making plans to come in for it.
Also, looking at some travel over the third week of November. I can't believe hotel rates are so low outside the USA. Looks like it's a prime time for a bit of tourism.
7 comments:
Just curious: is Austin succumbing to the "disease" affecting other popular or high-tech cities, such as San Francisco and Seattle, where affordable housing has become a rarity? (Today's WSJ has an article on Austin's homeless population.)
Hi Mike, pretty much...yes. In our zip code/school district home prices for a 3:2 run around a million+. While the average home price in Austin proper is around $400,000. That price includes houses way out in the suburban sprawl with long commutes and bad traffic congestion. To live in or near downtown, in a nice neighborhood with good schools, you can expect to pay a million and up for anything that's not a radical fixer upper.
The thing that makes it worse in Austin is that since there's no state income tax a large part of state revenue comes from property taxes. And the property taxes are some of the highest in the nation. Generally, that information is rarely included in price comparisons across markets. A $300,000 house might be subject to something like $12,000 per year in property tax, adding one thousand dollars a month to the overall cost of home ownership.
When one turns 65 the part of property tax that goes to schools (a large percentage of the total) is frozen. One mild reprieve.
I just got back from a Mediterranean cruise. For fun I supplemented my Panasonic GH5 with an Olympus XA and two rolls of Ilford XP2. I love XP2, especially in bright sunny conditions. I used it for "street" snaps around the boat and a really funky Greek grave yard near Olympus.
It was fun taking the rolls into my local drug store and getting them processed. The wait is something special and not something we get to enjoy with digital image making. I managed to wait until I got back to my vehicle before I pulled the 4x6 B&W prints out. Such excitement!! The images were great, well exposed and very sharp. Holding the sheet of negatives up was such a retro thrill. I also took some shots in Rome which turned out to be keepers.
I currently have Ilford FP4 in both a Nikon F5 and F90s. Don't get me wrong I love my GH5 and the wonderful files it creates but the organic feel of analog photography is what really gets my heart beating a little quicker. The 4x5 gets regular use as well.
BTW I still develop and print my non C41 negs.
Pull out that old Canon QL17 and have some fun with it!
Eric
Funny after a bit of research I just picked up an old Minolta 50 1.4 for my Sony A7II. A whopping $113 in really nice condition. Love it so far.
Mike R. I purchased a foreclosure with potential in a suburb of Austin 10 years ago for $165k. I can sell it for $325k tomorrow. I love Austin.
More a comment on the photo than the article, but this is as good a time as any to bring this up. I would really appecaite more discussion of adapted lenses. My primary motivation in buying my NEX7 years ago was the ready availability of adapters together with a collection of Nikkor lenses aquired over many decades. I learned through experience that there are many suppliers of adapters and the quality varies a lot. Some expect the lens to have an apature adjustment ring and other attempt (with varying levels of success) to work with the G-type lenses that adjust aperature internally. Over the years I've bought a lot of junk adapters and a few I really like. I haven't looked into these adapters for a while because I got frustrated and tired of throwing good money after bad.
I would love to learn what others have found to work well. An article on this topic might generate some really helpful feedback in the comments. I'd be glad to help. Then again, maybe this curiosity is just mine.
I have used my old Nikkor, Canon, Leica and some funky Russian lens via adapters on my Panasonic m4/3rd's cameras. Each has an interesting signature however I found them mainly useful for video work. There was nothing spectacular in there rendering that made them stand out over my Panasonic glass for landscapes. The Russian lens has lots of swirly bokeh when shot wide open but this effect gets really tiring fast.
I don't do enough serious portraiture to have an opinion on their usefulness in that application.
Eric
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