Scattered Thoughts . . .

I t wasn't raining this morning so I wandered outside to do a little bit of photography testing.  I am in the process of testing a new lens adapter to be used, mostly, for wildlife photography so I stepped outside for a short while this morning to see if I could find any birds or squirrels to capture in photos.  I'd even settle for a neighborhood cat but I couldn't find anything. After sitting crouched down low to the ground and perfectly still for about ten minutes, I was thinking I wouldn't see anything and that I might be wasting my time.  The birds that I did happen to hear were off to the east too far away from me to see.  After a few more minutes I decided to very slowly and quietly wander around the yard in search of something to shoot.   A couple of chickadees flitted quickly from one tree to another about 50 feet over my head so that was a good sign.  At least I saw a couple of tiny birds so now I was wondering if maybe I had spooked all the birds when I first

T here are certain brands that I refuse to buy, support, speak kindly of, or even use.  Sometimes, however, a reason related to practicality arises and I am stuck having to give in and purchase one of these brands simply because no other options exist.  As such, I'm stuck with three old Canon EF-mount lenses yet Canon is one of those brands you will not find me supporting in any way.  Don't get me wrong, they were great in the Canon AE-1 Programmable days but I'm not liking their options in the digital world.  Actually, I find their digital cameras very uncomfortable to use, even painful.  I also find their color rendering and tonal qualities to be quite bland but, admittedly, that is more of a personal preference. I had purchased these three lenses on the used market back when I first purchased my Sony cameras.  The Sony E-mount system was very young at the time so very few lenses were available in their new E-mount.  One of the great things about this Sony E-mount is that

A bout a week before the eclipse, I brought the telescope I had planned to use for imaging outside to make sure everything was working together as it should.  I mainly wanted to check the new telescope mount with automatic GPS tracking but I figured I'd might as well put everything all together to test them.  The new mount worked just fine and that is where my attention was but it turns out that I had also found an unexpected problem.  I was getting a reflection of the sun in the lower left quadrant of the image which you can see in the animated GIF below.  While I was outside testing the mount, everything seemed to be working just fine but after bringing everything back indoors and uploading the photos and videos to my desktop computer, I noticed this odd reflection on my monitor.  I knew I had to correct that before the day of the eclipse. When I brought everything outside again for a second test, I found that the easiest way to eliminate this reflection was to tilt my solar filt