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Paying the Price

A lthough I made great progress on a nice looking bridge for our garden railroad over the past few days (see previous blog entries), I am now paying the price! As most people who know me should already know, my original disability is due to an active career in the Air Force resulting in extensive spinal injuries after two separate line-of-duty injuries.   After the second injury, I was left with two herniated disks, four bulging disks, six compressed disks, spinal stenosis, thoracic osteophytosis, and a broken up vertebra in my cervical spine.  Needless to say, I've been in pain 24 hours a day for the past twenty-nine years.  Some days are worse than others but the pain is always there even on the best of days. Many years ago, two separate surgeons in two separate periods reviewed my MRIs and regrettably informed me that they could possibly fix one or two areas of my spine but the rest of the damage would still exist making it seem like no progress had been made by t...
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Progress on Girder Bridge

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I made some significant progress on our newly designed and now fully built girder bridge for our garden railroad yesterday.  Hmmm...  well, I guess it is not fully built just yet because I still need to pave it with fine sand and I need to add lights.  The bridge, itself, is fully built though.   Consequently, my spinal pain last night was unbearable.  My spine was on fire with sharp pain radiating to my hips, pelvic region and kidneys.  The pain truly was brutal, take-your-breath away type of pain.  I'm feeling significantly better this morning so that is good! Yesterday's primary job was to assemble all the balusters, the top rail and the parapet bearings at each corner.   This promised to be a tedious job but it went more smoothly and more quickly than I expected.   Each baluster needed to be glued and nailed in place, one-by-one, using a nail gun so it was definitely a tedious process.   My air compressor and nail gun...
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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 road-bound vehicles to this model railroad so I felt this bridge would be a good idea.   I started working on the 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 inev...
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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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