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...

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...

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...