Packing My Bags For The Misty Mountains

 

I’m thinking it is time to take a serious look at the ol’ camera bag’s contents. I’ve been carrying around the same bag for, give or take, 13 years now. It’s has gone through many changes in content over the years as I’ve gotten more, how shall we say, gear.

The bag has a slot for a computer. Originally I kept an HP Mini 1000 in there as my camera PC, I swapped that out for a crappy Chromebook five or six years ago. Once that died, I decided I wanted the ability to do some light work in Lightroom on the go, so I threw in this little HP Stream netbook someone gave me. That thing sucked. It only has 32GB of non-expandable internal storage. It was fine for a while, but when it got so that Windows couldn’t even update due to lack of storage, I just took it out of the bag and threw in my Surface Go 2 when I needed a computer in the bag.

But I wanted something dedicated.

I got my hands on a Lenovo Yoga 11e, and it runs Lightroom. It should fit in the bag, I kind of forgot to check that before I started messing with it.

Anyway, as for the rest of the stuff inside the bag, here we go:

Cameras: Nikon D40X, Nikon FE, Kodak Ektar H35.

Lenses: 28mm Vivitar Wide Angle, Vivitar TX mount 135mm, Vivitar TX mount 400mm, Nikon Nikkor 50mm (came with the FE), Spiratone 135mm, Nikon Nikkor AF-S 18-70mm, Vivitar Macro Focusing 75-300 and a Holga Pinhole.

I’m thinking about dumping the Spiratone in favor of a lens I dug out of storage the other day: 50mm Underground MC, because that lens is awesome and works with most of the filters I’m also going to add to the bag.

The Sony A6000 will be removed from the camera bag and probably just become an everyday walking around with camera. I just picked up this cheap, but neat little 35mm f/6.3 lens for that, and I’m guessing the Yashica “Red Special” FX-3 will become the general walking around film camera, because it’s awesome.

The biggest challenge for this whole bag thing is figuring out a way to store the filters I want to include. I want to spend a day walking around with a camera and doing some stuff, but I’m unsure if I will take the bag or a couple of walking around cameras. Or both, because I really want to use the lens on the Sony a little more.

And therein lies the problem. I want to get my bag set up to handle whatever I might need, and I use a great deal of this stuff pretty frequently, but I don’t want to carry it all around.

Why don’t I ditch the manual lenses film cameras and go with two or three AI zoom lenses, you may be asking. Because I hate them. I did that once. I cleared all of the manual stuff out of my camera bag and took several digital cameras and all of their automatic lenses with the intention of letting the camera do all of the work. It was horrible. I didn’t have a single picture turn out the way I saw it. Everything just felt so sterile and blah. Someone once told me that whatever it is that I do with the light is fantastic. What I worked out that day is automatic doesn’t do justice to my vision.

Anyway, I have more to come. Or rather, more to add from the past, but not tonight. Maybe next week.

Don't Take My Kodachrome

I was given these camera filters a very long time ago, and have never been able to get them to work particularly well. I asked Reddit about it last night, and someone kindly pointed me to an eBay auction for the exact same thing.

Turns out this is a filter kit from Korea.

As I said, I was never able to get them to work particularly well. Probably because the mounting kit that came with my set is for lenses with a 52mm filter ring, which I don't have many lenses that fit that description. The couple I do have, everything was just too close to get more than a vague blurry outline on the colored ones, so I took my Box o' Filter Junk and built something.

 

 

I ended up taking a wish.com fish eye lens, and clipping the mount ring from the kit directly to that. I paired it with an old but very beautiful Nikon 50mm f=1.4 lens on a D40X and had some fun with it.

Most of the filters with designs still won't focus, but the cloudy, dreamy designs are interesting:

What I really enjoyed, however, were the semi-transparent weird bokeh (maybe?) filters:

  

Yes, the light was weird. The sun just couldn't decide if it was going to come out or stay behind the clouds. There is very little in way of forgiveness with regard to a single f-stop or shutter speed setting. There were a few times where it was either super dark or super washed out and nothing in between. I did experiment with putting a crosshatch filter between the lens and the fish eye to tone down some of the light, but it didn't do much. Maybe next time I'll put an ND filter in there. I think I have an adjustable 52mm someplace.

All in all, I did enjoy messing with these and I will be figuring out how to use them more often.