Time for a new feature here on Ye Olde Personal Website (Blog).
I wrote earlier this week that I owed everyone a lengthy, navel-gazing post about my descent into the addiction that is photography. That will come in time. But I thought a rather useful way to harness the fury of that addiction for my readers’ benefit is to add a Friday Photo series. I can almost feel the excitement coming back at me through the Internet from all of your electronic devices!
Several of you follow me on Instagram, so these will often be repeats for you. The photos I share won’t necessarily be from the previous week. They’ll just be something I like that I want to share here. And, unlike Instagram where I just add a brief title/description and the obligatory hashtags, here I’ll share a little more about the picture.
So kick things off, here’s the picture I posted today on Instagram.
Power and Light – Fujifilm X-T10 with Yashica 50mm adapted lens, 1/3200 second, f1.9
This is a good one from a photo walk I took a week ago. I had just purchased my first adapted lens – a lens built for an older system connected to my modern camera via an adapter – and was eager to try it out. These older lenses often have a very different character to them than modern lenses. For starters, they were generally handmade. To some eyes that gives them a different quality than modern, machine-made glass. They’ve added some individual character through years of use. Finally, they are manual focus only, so it forces you to take more care it taking photos.
I went to a park about 10 miles from our house that I had never been to before. Just as I arrived, it started snowing lightly. But I was fired up to try the lens to I hopped on the trail and put in a couple miles. Most of the pictures were garbage: I was just firing away getting used to the mechanics of the lens, and the park was stuck in its late winter, plain, dreary phase before the colors begin popping for spring. When I got home and checked the photos in Lightroom, most of them showed that I had missed focus.
As I walked back to my car, I looked up and saw the sun trying to pop through the low clouds. I loved the way there was just enough brightness in the sky to really make the tower holding up the power lines look ominous.