Howdy listers, Been a bit quiet lately, despite Norm's usual baiting.
On holiday an hour inland from La Rochelle in the Poitou-Cherente (about half way down France on the left hand side). The blasted weather has been abysmal, with only three decent days this week - and one of those is supposed to be tomorrow, so that's a bloody gamble! As a penitence for bringing the rain with us, all the mosquitos in Cherbionneres have been exacting their revenge on me. I look like a prop from CSI. Been shouldering my Domke canvas satchel with only 2 lenses aboard: the K15mm 3.5 and the A*85mm 1.4 to accompany my Darkside 1D mark II and 580EX flash. It felt completely wrong not to bring the EF24-70mm 2.8 as a walkabout lens. It turned out to be the right decision though. What a lovely revelation it has been to wander ancient streets with one body and just 2 lenses to choose from. And both good old manual focus lenses to boot. I've had a ball with them. The 15mm is a superb piece of optical engineering as many of you will know. On a 1.3 crop camera it still gives a very usable wide image, and with no vingetting due to said crop. I don't even focus it - set it to f8, set the focus accordingly and just get lost in the framing with the camera set on aperture priority. It's not the brightest view at f8 on stop-down metering but entirely do-able. With the A*85mm I take a slightly different approach. I frame and focus at f1.4, and then depending on the nature of the shot, I usually stop down to about 5.6 or 8 and shoot, popping open the iris again immediately after, ready for the next setup. Or, as when shooting my son playing table tennis with his friend, shooting wide open at 1.4 to get that lovely minimal depth of field and creamy bokeh. Hand held, I tend to shoot either wide open or about f8. Really needs a tripod for anything past f8 depending on ISO. Usually I'm at ISO400 for wandering about picking off quaint window-boxes full of colour. No IS here! I brought a 750Z but haven't pulled it out of the pouch once. The nice thing is, I have done some really fulfilling photography - something I haven't done in some time, and that's what it's all about. We get home on Sunday, so hopefully I can do a bit of sorting and post some PESOs - something else I haven't done in a long while. I'll then be taking some pics of some Canon lenses before they go up on eekbay. I guess I'm just not suited to the auto-focus, image stabilising, auto-everything, wipe yer bum type of photography. It was fun, but I just didn't enjoy it like I used to years ago. Know what I mean? (written midnight Thursday, no doubt sent from the car park of a LeClerc hypermarche somewhere on the way to the beach on Friday via 3G Broadband card in the side of the PowerBook, dialling up on F SFR. French wifi does a 2.5 hour lunch, just like the rest of the blessed country!) B good, -- Cheers, Cotty ___/\__ || (O) | People, Places, Pastiche ||=====| http://www.cottysnaps.com _____________________________ -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
