While I was at a 4th of July party earlier this evening, I happened to see a dragonfly sitting on a wire. I grabbed my camera and 55-300mm automatic lens that came with the camera.
I was surprised it was still around when I had that done so I started taking pictures. That little dragonfly hung around for a while and was hamming it up for the camera.
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.
I went down to Old City Park this evening after the sun went down with the Star Point filter, because, well. You'll see.
Between the darkness and the very light rain that was falling, I was able to get some interesting things with the light using this filter.
After I got bored with the park, I went across the street to the ice cream shop. They had closed by then, but some of the lights were still on.
I was recently gifted a few camera lens filters. One is a standard pink-ish sky filter. The other two are creative effect filters. There is a Variable Star Filter filter and a Halo Swirl filter.
I got to play with the Spiral Halo filter today, and I really like what it has going on. Here are some of the pictures:
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:
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.
I purchased my first DSLR at the very end of December in 2012. It is a Nikon D40x. I used that thing until I wore the shutter out in August of 2018. I spent an obscene amount of money getting it repaired rather than just replacing the camera.
Ironically, in October of 2018 I got my hands on a Nikon D3100. My roommate from years prior had one and I thought that I liked it when we were in Texas in 2012.
You know what I did with that camera? Not a whole lot. I whip it out and use it occasionally for some darn thing or other, most recently the eclipse in 2024. I like the pictures that it takes, but for some reason, that particular camera never resonated with me.
In May of 2021 I purchased a Nikon D3500. I like that camera, and used it pretty exclusively (for my digital stuff) for a couple of years. I never fully put the D40x aside. It still saw the occasional bit of use, but for a while it was relegated to backup (above the D3100, I might add) use.
After doing some serious soul searching and trying to decide if it was worth keeping all of my camera stuff or offloading it, I decided to do something. That something was to go use every camera that I own. That was an expensive endeavor, since the majority of them are 35mm and film isn’t exactly cheap anymore, but I did it. I also developed almost all of the rolls myself at home, which was fun.
In doing that, however, I realized that for me, the fun is being able to get a good photo with whatever is at hand, and I think that I kind of lost that for a while when I was using the D3500 with it’s fancy lenses and settings and blah blah blah.
There is also the random side effect of accidentally acquiring at least 4 more functional Nikon 35mm cameras, but that’s a story for another day.
Needless to say, the D40x seems to be back to being my go-to camera, which is fun and challenging, since I don’t tend to use automatic lenses with it. I went to the Robert’s Camera store annual garage sale last weekend, and snagged a Vivitar 400mm lens for $5, which I’ve been having some fun with as well. Maybe I’ll put a couple of photos with that lens up here soon.
