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New Bridge on the Kensington Gardens Railroad

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A s summer was coming to a close and the leaves turning last year, Lukey (one of our grandchildren) and I were walking around the garden railroad talking about what improvements we could make by adding various features to this relatively tiny garden railroad.   One idea was to add an automobile bridge from near the passenger station to the other side of the garden railroad near the truss bridge.  This bridge would "bridge" one side of our imaginary land to the other through the garden sort of like a worm-hole in space.  I liked the idea of adding more vehicles to this model railroad this bridge would be a good idea.   I started working on this bridge over this past weekend and, as seen in the photos below, I made some good progress. I have a long list of things that need to be done on our house too but I started with this little garden railroad project to refresh my memory on the intricacies of woodworking.  I'd rather make the inevitable mistakes on a...
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A Few Medium Format Macro Photos

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Yesterday, I got to thinking about macro photos.  These close-up photos require some special equipment so I was wondering if I could patch something together to allow me to do some macro photography. Back a couple of weeks ago, I did try adding a macro converter lens to the front end of a couple of my old Pentax 645 lenses.  That worked "okay" but I did need to crop the photos a bit to eliminate hard vignetting.  It worked but it wasn't ideal. Yesterday, I remembered that one of the lenses I have been using on this Fuji GFX medium format camera is a Pentacon 50mm lens with a m42 mount.  The m42 mount is really just m42 threads.  It just so happens that I already use m42 fittings for my astronomy gear so I had a few m42 extension tubes on hand already.  Adding an extension tube allows me to get far closer to the object I'm photographing.   Every lens has a minimum focus distance...  if you try to get closer than this minimum focus distance, th...
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Fuji Features

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T oday I want to write about some of the interesting and rather unique features on my new-to-me Fuji GFX medium format camera. Like any of today's digital cameras, I have a number of different display arrangements that I can view on the back LCD as well as through the big viewfinder.  Fujifilm, however, has some very useful and rather unique options here. This display screen shown below is interesting.  On any of the other display screens, I can press a button to magnify the focus point making it easier to manual focus.  The focus point is moved around the screen by using a small joystick on the back of the camera just like on my Sony a7rIIIa camera body.  What is unique about the Fuji camera, however, is that there is a display screen that shows two views at the same time (shown in photo below)...  the full composition...  and the magnified focus point...  as well as   the histogram.  This is an extremely nice feature! The "Drive" button on...
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Medium Format and Tonal Qualities

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While I'm waiting for oncology test results to come back and to hear from my oncologist, I've been trying to keep busy in the house.  It is wet, rainy and muddy outside so I have no desire to be out there right now!  I've been splitting my mornings between the piano and some little photography tasks.  This blog entry is about some of the recent photography testing I've been doing while stuck in the house. For the past 12 years, my favorite camera has been my Sony a7 with its full-frame sensor.  When I first purchased this camera, Sony didn't have all that many lenses available for their full-frame lineup so I quickly purchased one of their crop APS-C cameras which have sensors that are a bit smaller than the full-frame sensors.  Not only was there already a large selection of lenses already available for this smaller crop format but the lenses for the crop sensor are smaller and less expensive so I was able to purchase some of the lenses available for this small...
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A Birthday Visit to ECHO Science Museum

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S heila and our granddaughter, Ellie, share a birthday so we tend to celebrate both birthdays together each year.  For their birthdays over the past few years, we've visited the ECHO Science Museum in Burlington and then gone out for lunch and this is what we did this year too.  It was a really nice day for all of us especially for Ellie and Gee! Our drive up to Burlington was longer than usual with far more traffic because the interstate highway was closed due to a bad accident.  The traffic didn't actually get bad until the last 15 miles...  from Richmond into Burlington.  From Richmond on, we were in bumper to bumper, slow-moving traffic. We had to travel on US Route 2 which is only one lane each way.  Fortunately, I actually enjoy the drive on this road and we hadn't driven this route since last summer so it was a really nice change until traffic was too heavy.   I used to live on US Route 2 for many years and I liked that it is one of the lon...
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