Adventures with the wrong lens

When I first started on digital photography, that was really the first time I had to care about "gear" in the sense that I had learned how to use my mom's Pentax MX and the two lenses I had - 24mm and 135mm - and had only made it as far as getting a gift from my dad of a Tamron two-lens kit, a 28-80 zoom and 80-210 zoom. I was able to find a new-old-stock ZX-L at the Ritz camera at the mall in 2005, got that, and used the living daylights out of it, enjoying access to autofocus and aperture priority metering.

[edit: skip to the second half of this paragraph if you read my post "reengaging with photography" from last year, as I didn't realize I basically already told it. sorry.] That all changed when I got my *ist DL, and the company was in the midst of introducing a bunch of new lenses to deal with APS-C image sensors. I actually skipped the 18-55 kit and went with the 16-45 zoom they introduced, as 16 got me out to the 84 degrees I was used to with the M 24mm lens, and then the standard DA 50-200 lens. That kit served me very well for a year and a half, when I got my first limited lenses, the 43mm and the 77mm. At some point in this stretch, my dad got me the 14mm from Pentax, which is still one of my absolute favorites. Through this stretch, though, I of course always wanted the star lenses. The 16-50 would have been nice, but I didn't feel let down in any way by the 16-45 (and indeed, if they were to reintroduce the latter lens, screw drive and all, but with weather sealing, I would be in line tomorrow). The 50-135, on the other hand... the 50-200 served me well but the softness and lack of speed at 200 left me wanting something faster. The pricing was never going to work well for my budget, though.

Until this year, when I decided to take a look at them again. I learned all about SDM motor failure and screw-drive conversions, and decided it was worth a shot. The copy I got for less than a third of what they cost new 15 years ago came out of the shipping box without wanting to autofocus at all. Eventually it got itself to the point where it would begrudgingly swing through the focus range over the course of ten seconds, and I was resigned to returning it. The next morning, I read someone suggesting that this lens could suffer from sleepy SDM, and that one way they were able to get around it was to point the lens at the ground, run the AF, then point the lens at the sky and run the AF again, and that would be enough to wake it up. Lo and behold, the focus is working correctly. At least for a use session, then if I leave it sit for a while, it will slow up again. I figured I could live with that if the lens performed well in the field, and then resolved to take it on a walk before deciding for sure.

Today, I took that walk. The lens performs superbly... at 135mm, which is the only place in the zoom range I wanted to use it. This actually just now has reminded me of my experience with the Tamron 80-210, a lens that I basically only used as a 200mm stand-in because the minimum focus distance meant it wasn't great at shooting pictures of small things really anywhere short of that length. I guess these are traditionally intended to be used for portraiture or general walkabout stuff, and nobody ever thought they'd be on someone's camera that was into little things. The 50-135 worked great for a couple of birds today, even, but it's a lot to keep in the bag for what is effectively something I can effectively do with a 100mm f2.8 macro, or if I were to dig up an FA 135 f2.8, I'd have the same field of view at a fraction of the size. It probably would not do bokeh as well and may not be quite as sharp, but those are trades I can live with in that world.

Anyway, a younger version of myself would not have admitted this. He would have kept this lens and basically let it fall into disuse, believing it had a place in the hoard despite the limitations inherent to a zoom lens. I'm proud of myself for being mature enough to know it's best to let this go to a new home, maybe where someone can convert it to screw drive (since that's not even something you can do on the latest bodies, it turns out).

Incidentally, on zooms: I do have one zoom lens I absolutely adore - the 20-40mm limited. Not only does it feel fantastic in use and produce beautiful images, because the zoom range is so small, the focal distance doesn't create problems with trying to use it at 20mm. I think if they ended up doing a similar lens design that was maybe APS-C only, 40-80mm f2.8-4, same limited construction and feel, I'd again be in line tomorrow for one. I see they made an M zoom in that spec that I may go with just for fun for a while, but I really would like something a little longer that's weather sealed for flowers and bugs. Yes, I do recognize that means I need to stop futzing with it and get the 100 AW macro.

A couple more highlights from the star lens:

Here's the rest of the shoot.

A Whole Decade of Difficulty

Fresh off my leg trying to kill me just before I turned 30, I showed up for a neck ultrasound because my doctor felt like my thyroid may have been a little weird. A couple months later, I was in for biopsies twice in the same month. Reeling from the comically high cost of coinsurance payments from these experiences, I was set for a right thyroid lobectomy. That was April 5. My first surgery. I wasn’t in a great place mentally at the time, and when I woke up after the procedure, it turned out I had right-side vocal cord paralysis. In the flurry of professional concern about my voice being so far gone it could have been considered miraculous if I made it through five hoarse, low-volume but high-airflow syllables without needing to take a breath, I got a phone call from the surgeon to cover two things: first, he was going to cancel the unpaid amount of my bill from coinsurance because he felt terrible for me, and second, he wanted to schedule a meeting with me.

Oh, also relevant: we didn’t know at the time, but I would go on to discover that I had severe difficulty coming out from under the effects of anesthesia and pain medications; that problem was five and a half years away from identification and treatment. So this whole stretch of time, I was in a prolonged brain fog. I basically only remember taking this phone call in a parking lot at the Laurel MARC station. I think it was sometime in the afternoon. I was not back at work, but able to be out and about.

The days the surgeon was in person at my doctor’s office are lost to the sands of time. I assume he called me to schedule on Tuesday, so maybe Thursday or Friday he would have been able to see me. Either six or seven days after the surgery. I only remember that it was in the first week.

That meeting, of course, was to tell me the lab results were back.

The last ten years have been Something. One, two, or more of them are lost for everyone. For me, I count most of 2013, especially the July to September/October range, as a complete bust. I had backed out of volunteering at the zoo, I was dealing with being incredibly physically drained from six weeks of my ability to restrain any meaningful amount of air in my chest while speaking or exercising, and just generally having a tough time with the diagnosis and treatment. I’m four total surgeries and one radiation therapy down the road and I think things are better, but a lot of this has shaped how I look at the world and I hope I turned out better because of it. Time will tell, I guess.

Photo walk gone good

I went for a photo walk on Saturday. This is the infamous "I finished my five year old roll of film" day... and I had taken my MX and also decided to take what I had gotten once as a curiosity but has become a backup body for when I finally get a service vendor to care about setting me up for the two things I need to get dealt with.

The Pentax K-01 is the also-ran mirrorless camera they built with designer Marc Newson, and the ergonomics definitely show the result of being done by a designer, not a photographer. The camera isn't difficult to use by any stretch of the imagination, but there are a number of things about it that make you want to just set it to auto and not do much. Also, since it uses the K-mount, the registration distance is still 45.46mm, so the camera isn't really much smaller than a standard SLR. It's quite a bit lighter, though, which is nice.

Anyway, since I don't use this camera all that much, I went out without checking on its settings (or indeed even verifying that the memory card I grabbed was any good or had any room on it). It was kind of liberating to just grab something and go... but it turned out that the camera was set to JPEG mode, not raw. For those that don't live in this world, the two things you lose out on are some fine pixel detail and then the detail at the brightest and darkest parts of the image. Basically, imagine a chart of brightnesses from 0 to 100; let's say the image shows us from 20 to 80. With a raw file, there's some additional detail in the parts of the image we can't see, and with editing software, you can change the brightnesses to let you see some of that additional detail.

So it's been a rough week outside the camera world... sick cat at home, work going through a dumb patch with new inventory policies, just generally having some wintertime funk. Imagine my disappointment when I got home and found that I couldn't do what I wanted with my digital pictures. I don't have much to share from that day specifically, nor can I say any of the images that were still on this random card from this specific camera with these specific settings that I took back in 2018 were worth keeping around. But I decided to tell my story and post some of them on a discussion forum populated by other middle-aged computer touchers, and they actually really liked what I was able to eke out of this frame. As I told them: it's good to remember that with artistic works, other people can look at your stuff and see past the internal limitations you see in your own work. I guess sometimes if you knowingly publish work below your usual standard, you might find that some of your voice and expertise still shine through. Honest process, honest feedback.