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Salvation is at hand! The new(ish) mirrorless jobbies don’t require one to know anything much about numbers – one can see the more or less finished job on the screen (or in the viewfinder according to your preference), so even in manual mode just set 100 ISO, f8 (or other at your preference), then twiddle the shutter speed knob until it looks about right (if you want to get REALLY sophisticated you can even have a histogram up on the screen and then just twiddle until nothing is at the black end and nothing at the white end, and … PRESTO!
I manage to ignore the early advertising fairly successfully, but the bl**dy awful christmas musak that seems to flood the shopping areas gets right up my nose. There has been some wonderful music composed and performed over the centuries (Mendelssohn, Mario Lanza …), so why are we afflicted with this poppy bilge instead? An affront to both ears and soul.
Had a box Brownie briefly as a child. Then got a Praktica initially with just the 50mm lens. Then got more serious with a Pentax Spotmatic again with just the 50mm, then got a Vivitar zoom (something like 30-105mm – very slow and not the best), some close-up rings, a cheap and nasty (quite nasty really, but fun) 400mm which lot I carted through SE and S Asia and Europe in a backpack.
Eventually after having a decent job for a few years upgraded to a Pentax LX with 50mm, 24-35mm (top little lens), a Tamron 80-200 or similar and a Tamron 500mm mirror-lens and a 2x extender as well as a variety of close-up doovers. Then had a bunch of kids in short order and did virtually no photography for about 20 years – survival mode.
Emerged from this hiatus to find that all things were now digital. So via eBay: Nikon D700 (terrific camera), 50mm f1.4 (also terrific), 28-85 (also terrific), 80-200 push-pull zoom (good optically but a bit clunky – subsequently got a 70-200 f4 which I still use with an adaptor – great lens) and 80-400mm (had a lot of fun with this, but eventually decided that the optics weren’t quite there – I’m missing the reach), also a Tamron 90mm macro (wonderful optics) and a Kenko x1.4 extender. Somewhere along the line acquired a Nikon D5300 (smaller format) as a 2nd camera with an 24-180mm zoom (lovely light little lens and surprisingly good optics for such a baby).
Then came the new mirrorless developments, so I’ve migrated to a pair of Nikon Z6, one with the 70-200 attached, the other with a 24-70 or occasionally 14-30mm. Still have the Tamron 90mm macro too. All excellent kit, but missing something longer. Checked out the Tamron 100-500 and Nikon 180-600 the other day, and am sorely tempted (took a pic with the Nikon at 600mm 1/13s hand held – perfectly sharp! Extraordinary!), but not feeling quite financial enough at present, and concerned about how to cart it all on aeroplanes.
Why Nikon? At the time I had no idea about the digital world, so it was a steep learning curve, and I simply found the Nikon model range easier to understand than the Canon. Ruled out Pentax, Sony and others simply because they didn’t have the range of lenses. No idea what I’d choose now if I was starting from scratch.
Oh dear John!
Alaska or Yosemite on the table and I’d be in like a shot, but despite many people whose views I respect saying how interesting (or whatever) it is (and I think can imagine what they mean) I’d almost pay good money to avoid Vegas (or so I tell myself anyway! Maybe if I had more and better money?). The Fatburger sounds particularly appealing – lol.
Gotta love autocorrect. I’ve switched it off on my phone after it started relentlessly ‘correcting’ my wording in a weird and totally inexplicable (not to mention incomprehensible!) mixture of English, German and Spanish – where it got Spanish from I’ve no idea, but it even started trying to talk to me in Spanish when I was Googling!
John: yes, it’s a bit out of the way, and most people who do get there hit the east coast (and fair enough too – there is plenty to see there), but the west has a lot to offer too (and much less crowded!) from the tropical north, through the rough and arid north-west with gorges (I’ll seize this opportunity to add a picture), spinifex and immense iron mining, the wonderful dry-land forests of the goldfields around Kalgoorlie (another picture), Perth (reputedly the most isolated big city in the world – picture), some of the best beaches in the world around Esperance, and the wonderful SW corner. One could easily occupy a couple of months in WA (that means Western Australia to those in the know, not Washington!) alone, but yes, it needs a reasonably generous budget!
These two got lost from my previous post …
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I’ll throw in another two bob’s worth: SW Western Australia
Great beaches mixed up with rugged rocky coastline, mixed weather making for good photography (far enough south to feel the ‘roaring forties’ – the westerly gales that sped many a sailing ship on it’s way to Batavia after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, but also drove quite a few onto the rocks if they went too far east before turning north), wonderful wines from the numerous picturesque vineyards (very similar climate to Bordeaux) served up in dozens of welcoming cellar door outlets, pleasant rural scenery (dairy cattle etc), majestic eucalypus forests (including E. diversicolor or Karri -among the tallest of hardwood trees) and other weird endemic vegetation and flowers, and the people rarely bite.
Iceland.
The people are great, the food is good, the coffee excellent, best cheesecake in the world, everything is just so well done – the roads are good (I’m talking the roads, not the tracks through the wilderness), there are wonderful apps with live cams, weather reports and traffic counts and showing road conditions/closures – one always has the feeling that ‘Team Iceland’ is there should you ever need them (but use your brains). Then there is the otherworldly scenery – extraordinary, raw, majestic … . It’s not really that cold (but do bring multiple layers of woolies and something good and waterproof and windproof ). The wind is something else – forget umbrellas.
Sorry – something’s gone haywire with the photos attached. One doubled up (which refuses to disappear), and one missed??
