Grinding Gear

So, the Shitty Camera Challenge is fixin' to start again, and I figured it would be fun to use the Nikon Coolpix 990 that was so state-of-the-art in 2000 but which definitely falls into the "shitty" category by modern standards.

Mine had been sitting on a shelf in the living room since I last played with it for this blog, back in...wow, it's been three years!

I pulled it down yesterday and the batteries were flatter than the horizon in Amarillo. "No problem," I figure, "I'll just get some fresh AA's out of the kitchen drawer." (I keep a well-stocked battery tray in there.)

I put the new batteries in the camera and turned the power on and...nothing.

Hmmm. Popped the battery compartment open and cleaned the contacts with a pencil eraser. Still nothing.

Blew air under the power switch and proceeded to pivot it back and forth vigorously. Apparently that worked, because the camera powers up now.

Fat Dan's Deli and Twenty Tap

"...television tuned to a dead channel..."

I stumbled across a neat (and very comprehensive) review of the game Neuromancer, which I have fond memories of playing with a friend at his apartment in Athens, Georgia, back when a 286 with EGA graphics was still a pretty decent gaming rig.

Go and check it out!

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Lenses I Live By: 50mm

The basic building block of any lens kit is, or at least used to be, the fast normal prime. In full frame terms, that's generally a 50mm lens with a maximum aperture of f/1.8 or faster. I have something like this for just about every system I use.

Nikon's excellent little 35mm f/1.8G is a great crop sensor prime, letting you isolate the subject and blue the background nicely.

Fuji makes a few 35mm XF primes of varying prices and maximum apertures, but on my Fuji cameras I like the 32mm f/1.8 Zeiss Touit. If you really feel the need for speed on a budget, Sigma offers their 30mm f/1.4 Contemporary prime for the X-mount, too.

The Zeiss makes me happy...

Still, given the versatility of modern zoom lenses, I usually only break out the 50mm equivalent when I need the really fast aperture. They do see more use than my 35mm wide-ish angle primes, though.

It comes in handy with cameras that aren't great in low light, like the small-sensor Pentax Q series, which has an 8.5mm f/1.9 prime that's a 50mm equivalent.

DSLR Pics: Triumph TR-3A with the Nikon D800

It's hard to believe that the Nikon D800 is over a decade old now. It's still an enormously capable camera and 36 megapixels is still rather a lot.

The image above, snapped on a Saturday afternoon in October, is a JPEG straight out of the camera. Like with all my cameras that can shoot RAW, I have the camera record one RAW file and one high quality monochrome JPEG. The reason for the JPEG is because that's the photo that gets shown for review on the monitor on the back of the camera when I chimp, and it keeps my head in that "light and shadow and texture" frame of mind.

Sometimes the JPEG itself is actually a keeper, too, like the one above. It should embiggenate quite nicely.  It was shot at ISO 200 and the lens was the 24-120mm f/4 VR zoom.

The actual color photo processed from the RAW is below.

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