Scattered Thoughts . . .

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...

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...

I n reference to the title of this blog entry...  I'm still learning a lot of things each and every day but, lately, I'm trying to learn as much as I can about a new-to-me medium format camera.   Today I had a bit of a detour though. I was working on doing some basic editing of these two photos, below, so I could post them here in the blog but Photoshop kept crashing on me and telling me that my GPU, OpenCL, OpenGL and DirectX were 'not compatible' with Photoshop.  I knew that was nonsense because I've been using Photoshop on this computer for many months with no problems.  I ended up spending the entire day troubleshooting this problem but I think I finally have resolved this problem which, honestly, should not have happened in today's world.  It was an incredibly frustrating day! I wasn't going to get into any detail about these computer problems but I should add a bit more here so I can reference this if this ever happens again.   I have two gr...

A s I mentioned in this blog many times in the past, I've always wanted to move into medium format digital photography.  Cost is a huge factor but patiently waiting for a decade while keeping an eye on prices daily has helped me slowly acquire a couple of medium format cameras recently.  One camera is an old film camera while the other is a digital camera from 2021.   Twelve years ago, I upgraded into Sony's full frame format and I still love that system.  Even compared to medium format, this Sony system has some significant advantages over medium format.  My Sony camera has great image quality and is ideal for sports, wildlife and fast moving grandchildren so it gets a lot of use and I'll likely never put it to rest anytime soon.  The image quality of this full-frame system is great and it is a fast shooting camera which definitely comes in handy when there are kids often nearby. As good as the images are when captured on full-frame sensors, medium fo...

A lthough I haven't used this particular camera in almost two decades, it was an important camera to me back then.  The Fujifilm FinePix S5000 Zoom was my first Fujifilm camera way back in 2003 and this camera introduced me to the uniqueness and beauty of Fuji cameras.   This was not my first digital camera as I had a few different one through the 1990s.  This was definitely not my first camera as I had been using film cameras since the 1960s.  This was, however, my first Fujifilm camera and although my primary camera has been a Sony camera for the past ten years, Fujifilm has always been very special to me and perhaps my favorite cameras. This camera was the first one I found to be an affordable digital camera that had some film-like qualities so it definitely had its place in my long line of cameras through to today.  I stopped using this camera around 2007 but it was still my first Fujifilm digital camera. I had tried a few other brands of digital camer...

I 'm still familiarizing myself with my new-to-me Fuji X30 compact camera and thought I should write a bit more about this really amazing little camera and especially Fuji's Camera Remote app. Over the years, I've recommended this camera to quite a few people who were mostly beginners with very little photography experience.  This can be a great camera for those who know little about photography yet it produces some stunning images.  Unfortunately, I don't think anyone ever went ahead and purchased this camera after asking for my advice (I could write a book about all the times I was asked for advice and then they did not heed that advice instead often going for something I would never purchase for myself nor recommend under any circumstances) but, I can now say with complete honesty, that this recommendation of mine was a solid one.   Even today, nine years after this camera was first released, I would still recommend this camera to someone who wants a small, e...

A new photography product arrived on my doorstep the other day.  I was eager to test it and play with it for a bit.  I have to say that my initial testing was rather painless, quite easy and fun! Let me point out that many of the photographic prints hanging in our house are actual lab processed prints developed in chemicals the same way that prints were produced from film back when I was a child decades ago.  I learned photography when I was a child   shooting film  and I processed my own photos in a darkroom...  well, sometimes and I sometimes sent them out for processing and printing.  I learned photography using cameras with no automatic focus, no automatic exposure, no automatic prints and I knew my way around a darkroom as well as how to effectively handle an all-manual camera.  In my opinion, these types of darkroom lab prints are far superior to modern inkjet prints.  Truth be told, I feel that typical home photo "printers" are a ...