pictures

02 Nov 2007

I bought a fancy new (old) Nikon EM I ran across at a pawn shop, and I have spent the past couple of days playing with it. Results are here. The Nikon is fun to use.. The 50/1.8 on it is nice and sharp and the DoF estimator is handy. I like a lot of the results. Film is a pain to use, but even the cheap 800 fujifilm I’m using has a nicer (aesthetically) noise pattern than my 20D’s CMOS sensor does. It tends to have a very unpleasant grid-like noise pattern, though admittedly not at ISO 800. The bokeh on the Nikon’s 50mm lens is gorgeous – best demonstrated here – I couldn’t identify any visible blades. I think it has 7. Is it possible to say “bokeh” without sounding pretentious? I don’t think it is.

On Halloween, while I was waiting for the film to be developed, I wandered over to the increasingly-deserted 100 Oaks Mall and took a few pictures. I talked with an old guy doing laps there for around 15 minutes because, as far as I can tell, we shared something unusual in common – actually going to 100 Oaks Mall. We chatted about cameras – he mentioned his older Canon that he had and I explained how it was FD mount and what he’d have to do to use it on newer EOS bodies and stuff. A truly exciting halloween.

I also recently put some batteries in my mom’s old Pentax P30t and I’ve been playing around with that. It’s a nice body, but it has a relatively crappy 35-80 4.5-5-6 sigma zoom on it. I’m still working on fixing the Yashica. (“Working on” == “taking off the cap periodically and staring blankly at the electronics”).

A friend of mine is also going to send me an old Yashica TLR to play with, so that should be fun.. It takes medium format 120 film. Film is a pain to deal with, especially since I was raised digital, but it’s worth it to play with all these older cameras, which are fairly easy to come by, it seems.

Oh yeah, I uploaded two new pictures available for prints on my website.