One More Cup Of Coffee 'Fore I Go

A while back I came into possession of a Sony A6000 mirrorless camera. 

(Yes, that IS a hand made Star Trek neck strap!)

Finally I am able to play around with it.

My employers gave me a broken camera and lens a while back.  The shutter was stuck shut.  After a few months of poking around online, I found a functional body for less than the cost of repairing the old one, so I snagged it.  There was a lens included with the damaged camera, so I had hopes that it would function.

It did not.

Since I have been pretty much all about Nikon camera equipment for the entire time I have been doing this, I ordered an adapter to allow me to use my Nikon F Mount lenses with a Sony E Mount camera body.

Once that came in, I was able to finally use the camera, and I must say, it is nice!

 

The above photos were taken with a 75-300 Vivitar Macro Focusing Zoom lens manufactured in about 1975 mated to this glorious 24.3 Megapixel beast, and I must say…The images this combination produce can be stunning if you take your time.  The lens is not fast by any stretch of the imagination.  Take your time, line it up and get it exposed correctly and it is beautiful!
Currently I have an old Nikkormat lens from about 1959 on the body, and the results are just as beautiful:

The low light results are also very nice, and for the most part, very clean.  I’ve gotten a few grainy shots with the ISO maxed out at 25,600 but, for the most part, I don’t need to use it that high since I can easily set F-Stops and shutter speeds to work in harmony with a flash to produce cleaner pictures.

The continuous shooting mode is smooth and fast, thanks to the mirrorless nature of the beast, but be wary…You will fill up an SD card real quick if you aren’t careful!  Took me about 3 hours to fill a 16gb card.  Part of that was messing around with it, but al lot of the space was taken up by the RAW files which are ~24mb each.

  

Overall, it is a camera that I am very happy with.  The size and weight take some getting used to after using a DSLR or SLR for so long, and it feels fairly durable.  I doubt it will fully replace my trusty old D40x anytime soon, but it is a lot of fun to use, and in some situations it vastly outperforms my old DSLR.

Wondered How Tomorrow Could Ever Follow Today

Decided to send a message to my old friend from school this evening.

We ended up having a nice conversation and became FB friends, so I guess all is well.  It was nice to catch up with her a little, she was one of the most positive influences in my life back in those days.

I Want My...I Want My MTV

While attempting to consolidate and, for a lack of better term, archive my web presence in one place, I completely forgot about my old Geocities sites.  Problem is by the time I realized that, Yahoo! had shut the whole thing down and deleted it.
Actually deleted all of it. For everyone. Everywhere.
ALL. OF. IT.
A huge record of the “early days” of the internet. Of early, free web hosting and usable tools for design.
Every now and again I check the oocities archive to see if either of the two sites I actually remember pop up.  I downloaded the index file for the nearly 1TB torrent, but I cannot find anything in there.  Nor do they seem to be present on the Internet Archive.
Maybe I have it backed up onto a CD. While not likely, I did find two pages on a CD I did for a birthday gift for an old friend last week.

Here are those, at least:

Faces Come Out Of The Rain

I saw someone at Kroger this evening who reminded me of an old...Friend? I guess you would call her?  Our relationship was a very odd one.

I know it was not her, but I began mentally having the conversation we probably would have had...It disturbed me to hear the things I think I may have told her.  Things I have been aware of for...Oh, I don't know the 22 years it has been since we met.  The year and a half of bad decision making leading up to it?

I should probably have a talk with the psychiatrist that lives in my head.

Pa Rum Pum Pum

Since I started out my photograpy stuff with 35mm SLR cameras and do not believe in post processing, I have amassed a sizeable collection of camera filters over the years.  Some of them are actually useful, some of them are just downright bizarre. A few of them I purchased, a lot of them were gifts.

My collection is mostly colored stuff.  I have a huge set of solid and gradient filters, a small set of colored gradient filters that I can actually screw directly to the lens and each other, a set of bizarre plastic I don’t even know filters that I refer to as my “analoge Instagram filters”, a couple of neutral density filters and even one odd…I don’t know? Fly eye? thing.  I also have a telescope lens attachment that I’ve never had ample opportunity to use and a fish eye job that I haven’t seen for years that I really need to find.

Solid and gradient filters

My wacky 5-way thing

SUPERSPEED!

Last but not least…My collection of analog Instagram filters!

On Every Page

This is going to jump around…A lot, so please stick with me.

I take pictures. 

Sometimes I take a lot of them.

Not going to lie, my preferred method is using a Nikon Nikkormat FS DSLR that was made in the late 1960s because it presents a unique challenge.

That camera is completely mechanical. No electricity whatsoever. No light meter, no nothing. No battery. No nothing. That camera has never once let me down!

CVS stopped processing film in store which is why I basically stopped using film.  I can no longer get a roll processed for $2.19 in less than an hour.  I have to send it off somewhere and wait a week.  I know, I know…#firstworldproblems and all of that, but for me I want to know so I can learn from my experience.  I want to see what I got before I forget what I used.

Post processing is a thing I really don’t believe in. For me each image is an individual lesson.  I want to know what I had so I can know what I did right and what I did wrong.  At any given time I will go on an adventure with several different cameras and lenses, so I like to know what I did with what while it is still fresh in my mind.

For me, the biggest reason I have stood by Nikon cameras is (other than durability) the Nikon F-Mount for lenses.  Nikon has used this mounting system since something like 1967, which means that virtually any lens that fits a Nikon camera from then on will work on a modern DSLR.

That makes me happy.  I have gotten so much amazing vintage glass for so cheap it is not even funny!

Also, I have found that shooting manual lenses on a DSLR has taught me enough that I can just shoot and go on 35mm and not end up nearly as many bad exposures as I used to get.  I have 3 rolls of nearly perfect film from 3 different cameras with 3 (vastly) different lenses to back this up.  No light meters, no nothing.

I just went with it.

When I Was A Child I Had A Fever

Here is the roll of film from the Minolta SRT-101 that I shot on November 30th.  Not going to lie, this might be the most perfect (color-wise, anyway) roll of film I’ve ever run through this thing.

There are some expsoures that were…Unconventionally altered? due to the back unexpectedly not being closed all of the way, and this camera has always had the occasional framing issue.

But seriously though…The exposures are, for the most part, dead on!  Not bad for a camera with no battery and no light meter!