Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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November Summer

477 words on

It was incredibly warm and sunny today. Hard to believe that it’s late in November. And to make the best of it, I took my super-tele out for a ride rather than having lunch as I still had a film to finish. A 500mm lens is just a beast of its own. Not only does it have quite a bit of magnification, it also reminds you that you are not particularly good at actually holding stuff without shaking it all the time. Luckily I was shooting at ISO 800, so I could still get a few shots with the hope that some of them turned out all right.

Using that lens also reminded me that focusing can indeed be a difficult thing. When trying to ‘shoot’ a bird, say, that’s ten metres away, you absolutely have to adjust focus when the bird moves back and forth. And with a fixed f=8 aperture, there’s nothing to adjust to gain additional depth of field (not that you wanted to do that anyway as you need all the light you can get into the lens to keep the exposure time short enough when you are not using a tripod – which wouldn’t be particularly convenient when aiming at moving objects.

I also took some photos with my tiny digital camera as I was going… the black and white film just isn’t that good at catching the wonderful colours of deep green meadows and the blue-white sky. If landscapes didn’t exist already, I’m sure manufacturers of tiny cameras would invent them to remind you that you really need something with a proper lens and without JPEG compression screwing all the details.

Clouds reflected in a little pool of water

At night I developed my black and white films which was a bit of a pain because the first one refused to properly go into the spiral. After twenty minutes of fiddling – which seemed like an eternity with my hands being stuck in the development bag and me not being able to see what I am doing – I was ready to give up and go and buy a new spiral sooner rather than later. As a last attempt I re-cut the beginning of the film to a more pointed shape than I tend to do. And then things worked smoothly. I will remember that trick for sure!

The films are drying now and – opening times permitting – I hope to scan them soon.

Those Canon SLR viewfinders tend to have a little grid of tiny prisms in a ring aroung the middle to help you focusing. It starts displaying rainbow colours when aimed at my MacBook’s screen while in focus… so in an absurd chain of wildly different technical devices, this is the result of my tiny digital camera taking a photo through the viewfinder of my analogue SLR that’s pointed at the screen of the MacBook:

The camera's viewfinder circles and focusing aids – with rainbow colours in the middle.

November 28, 2006, 2:12

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