Scattered Thoughts . . .

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...

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...

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 fter I wrote about my new-to-me Fuji GFX medium format camera last night, I got to thinking that I should probably add more camera size comparisons since I had written about how small this new Fuji medium format camera is compared to other cameras with smaller sensors.  So, I captured a few more photos this morning. This first photo shows my tiny compact Fuji X30 camera (on left) compared to the new Fuji medium format camera.  This compact Fuji X30 is small enough to easily slip into a coat pocket...   This next comparison is showing a camera that has a sensor that is a bit larger than the above compact camera but now the camera body is almost as large as the Fuji medium format camera!   This is my Panasonic G9 (on right) with its relatively small four-thirds sensor (same as 110 film size) yet the camera bodies are quite similar in size and shape.  The Fuji GFX medium format camera (on left) has a sensor roughly the same as a 6x4.5 film camera so the...

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...