New stuff for Diana

Well, the 2X teleconverter arrived today, dusty but in otherwise new condition. Nothing my little lens brush with the air-puff thingy on it couldn’t handle. Wanted to go try out my new lens combo, but it was already getting toward evening when I got around to it, and there wasn’t enough light left outside. Damn that camera physics, anyway. There’s nothing to really photograph in my immediate neighborhood that would benefit from the use of a teleconverter, anyhow—I just wanted to test it out. Ah, well. Maybe some other time.

Thanks to Meijer Non-Drowsy Severe Cold medication, my severe cold is getting a little less so. I no longer have that hacking, phlegmy cough, but my nose still drips like a broken faucet. Sort of. I slept for freakin’ 10 or 11 hours last night, so that helped a little, then I got the cold medicine over my lunch break today, which has helped a lot. Hopefully I’ll be better by Saturday’s class reunion.

Now, about my new job…
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(bad) photo of yours truly

Check out this horribly underexposed digital pic of me in my oversized XXL Bluecoats T-shirt (purchased Saturday night) and my favorite shorts (which are now two sizes too big). The original point of this pic was to show how stupidly big my clothes are on me; hence, the goofy “WTF” shrugging gesture.

Also: just went to shut the front door, and caught a glimpse of a pretty cool sunset. Even though our front yard / street isn’t much for a photogenic sunset view, I ran downstairs, slapped on the new wide-angle lens, screwed on the tripod mount, ran upstairs with camera and tripod, loaded up film from the fridge, and was outside shooting sunset photos in about three minutes flat. Used about 14 exposures of a 24-roll in not even ten minutes.

This is the trying tug-of-war between film and digital. The badly backlit photo of me might have been more easily salvaged if I had actual film to scan and work with; the sunset photos I just took might all suck, and I should have changed one little thing to make them rock, and I won’t know it until I get the prints back.

I Need More Toys…

So, after making pretty much an impulse buy on eBay (I didn’t mull it over for two days before bidding, which makes it an impulse buy for me), I’m contemplating buying myself a bigger, more premeditated camera toy: a new case. My current case just doesn’t have enough room for…

+ Minolta X370s (manual focus)
+ 28mm wide angle lens
+ 50mm lens
+ 80-200mm zoom lens
+ 2x teleconverter just purchased on eBay
+ macro filters (lets me get in reeeeal close)
+ polarizer (makes the sky bluer and water less reflective)
+ hotshoe flash
+ fresh and used film
+ various manuals, lens and body caps, notepads, and other accessories

The dilemma has been whether to just keep my current camera bag and pick and choose what I bring on any given shoot (a “shoot” for me being a trip to the Ren Fest, Fort Meigs, the zoo, the Apple Butter Festival, a drumcorps show, or other interesting local flavor) or get a new bag that can hold all my gear but that has the potential to be a touch cumbersome. The jury’s still out for me, I think.

Beth, Erk, other photo-types—any help?

Genealogy

So, I was just burning a CD of genealogy info from my Mac to use on my PC, and opened some genealogy photos to test the burn. In the midst of my browsing and testing, I came across this image of my great-great-grandmother—my maternal grandfather’s maternal grandmother. (Did that make sense to you?)

Nora Marie Lemons, circa 1908OMG. Does anyone else think that, given a circa 1908 Katherine Janeway-style hairdo, I look like her? Can you see the resemblance? I can. It’s kind of weird. I looked at the whole picture, with her husband Harvey and child Lucille, and thought that Harvey looks a little like Grandpa Cook (or the other way around). Then it occured to me that Nora looks like Mom… and me! I mean, I know we’re related and all… duh… but it’s still kind of strange to look like someone who died almost a lifetime before I was born.

Beth, your family’s into genealogy—any input on genealogical photographic weirdness?