October 15, 2022 - Unmemorable apparent firsts

 I picked a very old gallery to look at for today and am coming up completely empty on any specific reason or goal I may have had in mind for this walk. It wouldn't be terribly unusual at this time to have had no specific goal, except to spend time outside and try to take pictures of "fall" or something. I do think there were a few things that I found on this walk that have become repeated goals in autumnal trots, though.

This photo is the first mild-wide shot of anenome flowers in front of blue sky that I think I may have taken. Through a 21mm lens (APS-C), the added context of the other flowers in and out of focus give this image a lot of depth and do a pretty good job actually conveying to the viewer what a thicket of anenome actually looks like.

While not at all my first recording of a butterfly on verbena, this was an early example of getting one in good critical focus with a non-macro wide lens (the 21 again). I have found that butterflies can be surprisingly tolerant of a photographer as long as you move smoothly and tend to stay near the animal but not too close. How I managed to do that with a wide-angle lens, I don't know, but successes like this one kept me trying at it.

Every time I go to Brookside Gardens now, I look for green tree frogs under the sidewalk illumination lamps near the visitor center. These frogs tend to wander up underneath, presumably to take advantage of warmth and of shade during the day, with the bonus of these lights likely attracting bugs once they light up in the evening. That's an observationally-supported guess, based on how much spider web I've found under all of the lamps this fall. If the spiders are able to support themselves there, the frogs surely also knew it was a safe place to hide and eat. This photo is through a 14mm lens, so as little as the cabbagewhite in the previous photo cared about my proximity, this frog cared even less... or it believed it was camouflaged adequately, I guess.

Finally, this wasn't a first, but it was pretty and it demonstrates a relative rarity in the wild: non-purple echinacea flowers. I believe there's only one species that blooms yellow naturally, though there are domestic cultivars that come in several colors (including a kind of gross-looking greenish petal color). These red flowers are well represented in garden collections around here, but rare in large, wild planters and don't seem to do much to escape cultivation and establish themselves.

2025 Bulbs, Part 2 - or - oops, all macro lens shots

There's no unifying theme for these images. This walk is actually the week before the last bulb post, and while it's obvious the light was still pretty flat, you can tell there's more color present in these shots. Rosid trees were in bloom, though no significant representation from cherries. As tends to be the case, though, the bulb flowers received more of my attention. These little narcissus flowers (via 100mm macro) are showing the little bit of moisture that remained from perhaps watering that morning.

This narcissus was in a much earlier-blooming stand of flowers, from what I remember. My memory is a little hazy on them, but near this photo, I have one of a blossom that was quite thoroughly slug-eaten, and in my experience with my day-lilies at home, the slugs take a little while to find a bed in bloom. This flower escaped the attention of the slugs, but not the ants.

These two tulips were about to open. I was taken with the fact that it looked like they were doing so together, as a pair. It made for a nice scene, though if I ever print this one, it'll be 8x10 - I only just now saw I failed to frame without the garden sign in the background.

I felt like this was the star of the day, though. I don't often get a chance to make interesting images where the subject is centered in the frame, but every once in a while works for me.

Interestingly enough, all four of the images I selected to represent this walk are from my 100 macro. I am not sure what lenses I actually took on the walk, but only three are represented in the 54 images i uploaded for the day - I shot one image through my 14mm, five images through the 20-40 zoom which I adore, and the entire remainder are the macro. Pentax's 100mm AW macro has become a really common carry for me on both APS-C and 135. My travel kit, if I get three lenses, is 16-85, 55-300, and the macro. If I'm doing a walkaround, I'll select a kit that makes sense for the weather, but the one overlap, regardless of if I'm doing ultrawide+standard zoom or array-o'-primes will be the 100. It's small, light, and does two things really well: 1:1 macro and middle-distance portraiture for flowers, like on this post. Traditionally, my go-to for the latter has been the 77mm f1.8 Limited lens, which I still absolutely adore... but that lens carries the penalty of lack of weather sealing, and would usually leave me without close-focus capability.

September 24, 2022 - Mono means one, pod means pod - and, u l t r a w i d e

contextualized

Most of the work I do is documenting what I have called fiddly little things, which involves a lot of flowers and insects. One would think this would be work that leads itself to a lot of macro lens time, and you wouldn't be wrong if you found yourself in that camp thinking about me... but I also spend quite a bit of time doing this with wide angle glass. When I first started using 'real' cameras in 2003, I had exactly two lenses: an smc-Pentax M 135mm and an smc-Pentax K 24mm. Lens designs contemporary to the 1970s appear to have assumed nobody would ever try to take close-up photos with a lens that was not specified for the purpose, so the 135 does not get terribly close to anything. That's great for things like rabbits, but for flowers, a theoretical 1:9 maximum reproduction ratio isn't very inspiring. The 24mm focusing at a quarter meter does a couple of things: first, a nominally tighter 1:7-ish ratio does actually make objects larger on film, and second, the photographer being actually closer to the object makes it feel... well, closer. I spent a lot of time 'misusing' that ultrawide lens, and so I developed a fondness for my own accidental style, one of context surrounding an object. The lead image on this post is such an example... it's not going to light the world on fire as an artistic accomplishment, but we get detail on the flower and we get a lot of background showing where it grows.

This specific example is on a point of land into Pine Lake in Wheaton Regional Park in Maryland that often gets used as a fishing point. These little asteraceae blooms were waiting to greet anyone that bothered to wander off into the woods to watch the small group of ducks and geese on the water. I used my 14mm (APS-C) to do this capture, a lens I absolutely adore using, and one that I wish would get a reissue with more aperture blades and weather sealing.

This photo is through the 21mm (APS-C). While not an ultrawide field of view, it's still very much in the genre of "look at the wonderful world around the thing you're photographing." With these anenome flowers being so delicate and pale, exposing for them tends to produce a beatiful vibrant blue sky on clear days like this one. 

I think this is the star image of these three, though. Milkweed bugs patrolling a seed pod made for a great foreground with the structure of the plant visible in the back. The only thing I wish I had been able to frame up a little better would be fully-open flowers, as none of the buds on the foreground sprig had gotten to the point the flowerhead just beginning at bottom center at that point. One of the things you have to accept doing this kind of photography, though, is that it is nature and therefore subject to the sense of order of things that respond on a seasonal timescale. I can't make a flower bloom, and don't want to try.

That said, I never will just go out with a set of ultrawides. I do have to carry a macro lens with me, and this walk was one of my first with a monopod.

Using a 100mm macro and on-camera flash, I was able to stabilize enough to catch this moth napping on what looks to me to be goldenrod. This photo also managed to do something that's relatively hard to do by accident with flash-macro work and shows background detail, not just a dark rectangle. Macro with context is really difficult to do like that unless you're kind of intentional about making sure the background exposure is going to be within the same couple of stops as the subject.

Or you can just shoot bugs in a flower. This species of hibiscus is almost always good for finding something lunching inside, and this day it was a little bumblebee and a honeybee. This image also did something I always love finding out in processing when I get home though...

It contained bonus bugs! I do think this might be a parasitic fly that was tending to the honeybee, but regardless, there's a whole world of little things going on even beyond the little things I can see and decide to act on. I also love the fact that the added detail of the pollen stuck to the bee really shows how pollination works.

2025 Bulbs, Part 1 - or - color in gray

 I'm doing flower posts out of order here, as April 19 was the last day I went out specifically to do spring bloom work this year. Unfortunately for the drama of the photos, none of the days I had time to do sessions at the gardens featured anything other than uniform overcast. Fortunately, fast glass and bright colors can do a lot of heavy lifting on their own, and I've also gotten to be much handier with managing curves and color balance to add a little extra pop if the image calls for it.

I used full-frame this walk, and few kits on a nice day are more rewarding to do flower work with than the FA Limited lenses. The three frames I selected for this post are all through the 77. When I shoot flower portraiture like this, the 77 has always done a fantastic job painting the scene. I had concerns when I got a full-frame digital camera that the wider field of view would create a problem for me, as I had only ever shot the lens on APS-C where it's about equivalent to 115mm, but practice in this field and a little experience doing portraiture sessions have made me more comfortable with the native field of view of this lens.

These tulips were planted at the Brookside Gardens fragrance garden area this year. All of the hexagonal beds featured these three colors, with maybe a less uniform distribution than I remember them doing from years past. There were fewer people enjoying them this year, too, but I think that's because it was gray, and my experience is that only the die hard gardenfan will spend time outside peeping on days that aren't full-sun and warm. One can make an argument that 80 might be too warm for a mid-April day, but it certainly wasn't an obstacle for me.

A new favorite thing from this year was magnolia flowers that were bloomed in such a way - usually via missing a petal - that you can see the stamens and carpels through a window in the petals. This saucer magnolia was doing a great job of that, and with the distance I had between the flower and where I could stand outside the bed beneath it, I was able to throw another flower out of focus in front of it. I remember reading someone once say that under no circumstances should you ever have anything out of focus in front of your subject... I can't imagine leaving an entire set of layers out of your compositional toolkit just because you think your viewers are too dumb to handle it, though.

Magnolias, at least saucer, star, and sweetbay, represent an interesting challenge generally thanks to their tendencies to flower too high to effectively photograph like this. In a way, that's one of the nice things about the distance created by a flowerbed you're not allowed to walk in. I have my limits, since the most reach I have native full-frame is 135mm, but I suppose if I know I want to do this in advance, I just take APS-C gear instead.

Another "huh" about this selection of shots is that all of them are subject-right. I will do that a lot with picking candidates for share. I suppose this is because I get biased to one side of the screen or another by my first few good shots, but who knows for sure. Maybe it's because I'm right-handed?

This narcissus bed was closer to the conservatories. As you can see in the lower left, it was pretty late for some of these, but the open flowers from that morning or the day before were striking. If I had this shot to do over again, I'd stand up a little bit and try to get the clump in the background more in line between the foreground and secondary flowers - or it's possible this ended up like this because there was a fencepost or sign to the left. I do try to shoot around the obstacles in the gardens, and sometimes it forces slightly weird views.

One thing missing from this frame that I know I've seen in other shots of narcissus flowers is an ant. It's a pretty common experience to come home from a garden session and find at least a couple of shots like this will contain ants on the flowers. I don't usually think of ants as pollinators, but they're there, dutifully shuffling probably nectar around. 

The final observation I'll provide here is that I do need to be a bit better about my editing practice from days like this. Most days, I will use shadow and highlight controls to expand my images' histograms to fill the full range of brightnesses. Doing that will give your images a lot of pop, but they become in a sense dishonest, featuring shadows that weren't there on the day. I'm not against extreme editing practices categorically, but for my own work, a subtle pushing of the boundaries is what I generally want to aim for. I might have to do an A/B demonstration at some point, but leaving the darkest pixels of the image off the 0 floor is a big benefit when processing this type of image.

Relocating effort

 

Surely, in late 2025, more than enough keypresses have been actuated in pursuit of the philosophy of how normal people have ceased to have a positive experience on social media. I had originally intended to start a long, rambling post about how my experiences seeing things people I like or know, or at least follow, have been replaced with Zucksites attempting to find exactly what fetish content I want to see.

It's funny to think of how much negative attention Facebook specifically has gotten off using personal information to build scary-accurate profiles of everyone to market things and to increase negative emotion to keep eyes on its pages. It seems to me that all they actually know about me, despite having been on the site for 19 years, is that that I'm a cishet male. They don't even seem to have an age range down, and they seem to have concluded the single most important thing about me is the 'het' part of their profile for me. I suppose it's possible their users are paying to boost their content? I don't know how reels work, but I do know the algorithm as a whole clearly doesn't get me, and it seems clearer to me that nobody is actually creating anything to post on that site anymore anyway.

At least it's not universally like that. On Instagram, I have accumulated a small group of people, both photographers and appreciators of photography, who see and note my work, and I've managed to curate a group of people who have no interest in algorithmic content generation or short-form video content who do at least see my work, and that makes me happy. This is so clearly contrary to Mark's wishes... I recently "got what I asked for" in the form of an iPad-native version of the IG app, which dumps directly into a video-first, autoplaying-with-sound-on-by-default experience that shows nothing but content from accounts I don't follow. Personally, I don't go to social networks to discover new people, but whatever... I have my sharing workflow figured out, and I can do that song and dance for the foreseeable.

So anyway, the plan: I've written this post probably seven or eight times over the history of this site. I intend to come back, then I forget about it after a month. That's why it's called the content vortex. What I'd like to start doing is just writing about my photography outings. I want to stick with something I'll be good at, and I like talking about my experiences out and about. I have, to date, primarily done photography with the old adage in mind, using my photographs to tell a story about where I go. I have no idea if the tens (or sometimes hundreds!) of thousands of words from each outing have actually made any impact, but I also know I've not done any discourse on my process or thinking, and I don't tend to talk about my actual experience being out and about... and hopefully that changes going forward.

In the short term, I will probably go back to a few select outings from the last few years and get at them. In the long term, the focus will stay more on more recent work, though I have about two decades of activity I can go back over, and most of that is a relatively unexamined body of work and experience.

Hopefully I keep some inertia behind this go!

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.

On Cropping

When I first started in photography, it was on film (as thoroughly discussed across the broad history of this blog, and mentioned in the previous post), and it was C41-process prints from photo shops. I did not ever do my own development (though I have a curiosity about the process and see now that there are at-home C41 kits, and color speaks more to me than black and white...), and I never at all thought to try at-home printing. My prints were as they came out of the camera.

With early-boom digital SLRs existing in a world of about six megapixels and a maximum usable ISO of maybe 800, more often 400, there was no significant* room for cropping. Not in my experience, anyway. I got used to living in a world where I was disappointed I didn't have access to lenses that created the exact framing I wanted on sensor. Practically speaking, that means I had to settle for having a slow 200mm zoom.

As I fast forward 15 years to get to today, I have all of the sudden found that I don't care anymore. Almost every single photo I take, I crop for artistic refinement. I've almost completely stopped worrying about filling the frame with my shot, which has helped a lot with feeling held back by the amount of money I can put in front of the camera. This seems to entirely come down to the fact that I have accepted the resolution of the 24.whatever megapixels I have available to me as adequate for detail at crop, and that processing raw photos to remove the failings of old film-era coatings has gotten to be so good that I can reliably make any of the glass I have look good enough for what I want at pretty much any crop setting, as long as I have done a good enough job with the technicals of aperture, focal point, ISO, and steadiness.

This is all to say that I've found a significant feeling of liberation by actually taking advantage of the hardware I paid for, and also I have a much greater degree of appreciation for the work the engineers are doing to make the imaging and processing algorithms better. It lets me do things like snap with an inappropriate focal length because it's the lens I have with me and get results like this:

out of framing like this:

with a camera lens from 1978 (smc-Pentax M 135mm f3.5) mounted on a camera body released in 2013 (Pentax K-3). It makes me wonder how much better I could do with the advances in stabilization and high-sensitivity noise, and with exposure latitude, if that's something that's improved in last year's K-3 III. I know the K-1 and K-1 II both have significantly more exposure latitude than the K-3 did. I don't want to say I've already outgrown the K-3 given how little I've used it since I got it in 2015. I did my 11,000 pictures with the *ist DL in 4 years, apparently about 14,000 pictures with the K20D in 5 years, and I've only just gotten to 9,600 today after 7 years with the K-3, so I've slowed down considerably as phones and a general lack of interest in the hobby have taken their toll on me. If I outgrow the K-3, I don't know that I could pick a single replacement anyway, as both the current K-3 III and the K-1 II present significant advantages for my interests and lens library... not least of which in the case of the K-1 II is that it should be less hard on my film-era lenses for their imperfections, and also because it will further enhance the bokeh experience I have with my 43 and 77 limited lenses.

Anyway, all that's to say I am really enjoying getting out and doing this stuff again, and letting it tickle my brain has been rewarding so far.

Reengaging with photography

Well, since it's been over a year since my last update again, on the off chance anyone was actually rotating through here on a regular basis: sorry.

I was recently supposed to have gone on vacation back to where I grew up, and I had booked a lot of time beyond the high school reunion date to get out and explore and maybe reconnect with 'home' while I had an excuse to do so. As part of the prep for that, I bought a couple of new camera gear items for the first time in almost seven years. I used to be a huge photography nerd, starting back with my Kodak advantix point and shoot, and then moving into 35mm when my mom gave me her Pentax MX. By the time I finished college, I was blowing through $200 a month in film and processing, and that was back in 2006, so jumping into digital made a lot of financial sense for me. My graduation present was an *ist DL and the DA 16-45 f4 lens, and I put in enough practice with that camera body (at least 13,000 pictures between May 2006 and January 2010) that I outgrew where it kept sensitivity and focus settings, so I moved into the K20D with some reluctance, as I barely had enough money for that to be My Thing in 2010. I shot two weddings with my K20D, and hung onto it for five years, moving to the newer K-3 in 2015. I had picked up a couple of additional lenses in that time, but the last one I had pulled in was the HD DA 20-40 f2.8-4 Limited zoom.

A brief aside... Oddly, as I look at my habits and past work, I tend to gravitate toward two frames: close up with a wide angle, and zoomed as far as I can go with whatever telezoom I happen to have. In film, this was set up with my mom's K 24 f2.8 and the Tamron AF 80-210 f4.5-5.6 my dad got me; when I went digital, I gave my autofocus camera and autofocus lenses to my cousin, so for the next decade or so, it was the 16-45 (I picked 16 because I wanted the same field of view as the 24 on film) and a DA 50-200, which I think was probably a step backwards from the Tamron. After that, I got a DA 55-300, which has been with me out of the house nearly every time I take my camera anywhere. It isn't a terribly good lens, though, at least not for distant wildlife. I found this out the hard way when I tried to document our trip to Delta, Utah this spring, when I got a series of a few thousand white blobs that represented the snow geese. The 20-40 Limited lens has gotten a LOT of use despite not filling either of these niches. It's just got such a delightful character that it more or less pushed both the HD DA 21mm limited and the 16-45 out of my regular rotation.

2015 was a long time ago, and a lot has happened since then. I spent a lot of time with music, and I think music kind of took the place that photography had from about 2016 through 2019. In 2019, I had to back out of music for a while because of more surgery, and then 2020 happened. Some might argue it is still happening. Having lived through all that, I wanted to do something nice for myself, and I had already given myself the brainworms for long glass following the Great Delta Disappointment.

I got myself a DA★ 300mm f4 telephoto lens. Used, from Japan. It showed up smelling vaguely of cigars, but hey, small price to pay for the right deal, and a significant savings over new. Almost immediately after ordering that, but before it arrived, I realized I was going to have a problem in Oregon: I wanted to spend a lot of time on the coast, but I didn't have a weather-sealed walkabout zoom, nor a weather-sealed telezoom, for that matter. I fought with myself for a long time about did I want to go with the DA 18-135 or did I want the width of a 16mm and need the DA 16-85? When I face a question like this, I tend to do a lot of research. Too much, probably. All indications were that the 18-135 and the 16-85 were effectively indistinguishable in practice, though, and so I decided the 16mm was going to be the more important consideration. I ordered one, used, from KEH. It did not arrive smelling vaguely of cigars.

Another brief aside: I don't like the 16-85 very much. It's got fine optical performance, possibly better than the 16-45, but it does not focus as closely, it still manages to have some shift in the optics when the focus changes direction, the manual focus feel is garbage, and the lens hood is fiddly to put on and take off. On top of that, it's enormous. The zoom range is nice, though, and I don't think I particularly miss the 85-135 range.

It was shortly after the 16-85 arrived that my cat started to tell me he was about done, which ended up coinciding with when I needed to get packed to leave for the west. The vet's report from his imaging told me I needed to cancel my trip, I spent as much time with him as I could, and I said goodbye when he needed me to. All of that was miserable, and I needed an escape, I guess... and so I've really leaned into photography as a good way to get myself out of the house, to get me back into paying attention to the world around me, and to get me moving again. I've done a walk with the 300, I've done a walk with the 16-85, I've tried to carry both around at the same time, and I've tried to carry around a bag full of kit with the 300 velcroed onto the side.

Today, though, I took a different kit with me to an old favorite, Brookside Gardens in Wheaton. I took my K-3 and a whole pile of primes and my trusty 16-45. 14mm, 21mm, 24mm, 50mm, and 135mm were the fixed length, and only the two widest were modern lenses. The 24, 50, and 135 are all lenses my parents gave to me many years ago. I haven't spent an extensive amount of time shooting with any of them in years, and shooting with old K and M series lenses on a post-2004 camera means stop down metering and a lot of patience with trying to get focus right. I had a focusing screen for my K20D that had the split image focusing aid for just that situation, which also meant the metering was messed up. Well, it was messed up more than normal... for whatever reason, I've almost never gotten good metering results with these lenses when using stop-down metering. They tend to dramatically overexpose the shot, requiring in some cases -1.3 or even -1.7 stops of EV compensation to produce a raw file that does what I want. I don't know why I struggle with it so much, but it's been the case across all three digital SLR bodies I've had and impacts all four of the K and M series lenses I have. Anyway, I wanted to make a point to suffer today, and I loved almost every minute of it. There were a few times I forgot to set the focal length when turning the camera back on, there were a lot of just-fuzzy missed focus shots, and there were more than a few instances of just having a scene that the combination of high resolution APS-C sensor and lens coatings and optical forumulae from the 70s simply couldn't handle well together.

I think I've done it, I think I've rekindled the love. I haven't processed all 101 shots that made it out of the 250 I took, but I wanted to share an example out of each of the three manual lenses.

Pentax K-3 + smc Pentax-K 24mm f2.8

Pentax K-3 + smc Pentax-M 135mm f3.5

Pentax K-3 + smc Pentax-M 50mm f1.7

For the last few days, I've been fighting off a number of similarly-functioning brainworms. I'd love to get a newer body to take even better advantage of the improved autofocus technologies in the 300 and 16-85. I'd love it if that was a K-1 ii, but that's a big and heavy camera, and the K-3 iii is right there. Both of those are expensive, though. The K-1 would give me a lot of additional depth of field on the FA 43 and FA 77 Limited lenses, and it would give me back the full field of view from my old standby 24... but still expensive and heavy. Maybe a KP? Used, they're not bad, and they're smaller and lighter than the K-3, but I'm not sure it's enough of an improvement over my K-3 to justify, and it would just take money away from being able to buy one of the new production models, and buying a new production model would help to encourage the company to keep making cameras and lenses.

Well, fine, then... maybe not a body, maybe a lens. I used my 14mm today, which just puts a smile on my face every time I use it. How about a DA 12-24 f4 zoom then? Used, since of course they're discontinued. But there's also the new production DA★ 11-18 f2.8 zoom. Which is expensive and huge and heavy, but it's also weather sealed, which neither my 14 is nor the 12-24 would be. 

And then there's the not-SLR world. I have been thinking very hard on picking up a used MX-1 based on the YouTube algorithm recommending me a few videos in the "is this still a good camera after a decade?" genre. But it's old, and huge. What about a Ricoh GR? I find the snap focusing fascinating in concept... but fixed 28mm or 40mm is a little scary to me for some reason, probably because the camera is expensive and I don't want to end up wanting two.

Anyway, all that's to say: anything I have brainworms on, I'm engaged in. That's a great sign, and that feels good. My next trip out will include more automatic lenses, but I'm really looking forward to rotating through my equipment more in the near future.

Dear Robots, Thank You.

I saw a bunch of folks put up posts about Daft Punk's announcement yesterday, and I had an immediate thought about that (especially with Touch as the music on the farewell video), but wanted to give an album a spin today with the intent of reflection and now feel like I have something to say.

I was late to the party, having been directed to the release in August, about three months after it came out. I never listened to Daft Punk intentionally, but the two lead radio singles, with Nile Rodgers providing the guitar tracks and Nathan East on bass convinced me I had to have a copy of the whole album. Somewhere within the first 25 minutes, I was awakened to the sound of post-disco and synth pop, or at least this particular blend. The album made the cut for my monthly listening for at least five years, and while it's dropped off some in rotation, it isn't because it wasn't influential to my taste in music. The most recent album that's fallen into this slot is Donny Benet's Mr Experience, from last year (with some crunchy fingerstyle StingRay work), which sounds delightfully 1983 to me. I can also trace the Cory Wong habit to this, and it is also the source of blame for the Zainichi Funk CDs I've ordered from Japan.

 

On the subject of the 1983 and the title Random Access Memories... I have few memory connections to my early and middle childhood, what with all the head trauma, with really just random events here and there to fall back on. In much the same way that the smell of hospital-grade cleaning supplies and medical-issue low-pile carpet used to send me into an actual panic, though, I guess the combination of strings, horns, and synthesizer really speaks to the sounds of the radio and shopping-trip background music I would have heard early on while growing up. Whether it can qualify as nostalgia, it sure seems like I had an immediate positive emotional reaction to the style. It also came into my orbit at a particularly important time in my adult life, and links me to a state of being I haven't been able to really get at since. Fresh out of the thyroidectomy but before I found out about the lymph nodes. Driving 'home' for the night after chowing down on a particularly nice pizza in Charleston, West Virginia, with Rogue's Dirtoir accompanying. Having a stable voice again and finally being at a certain stability with my thyroid replacement hormones. You know, the whole scene.

 

But all that wouldn't be anything to recommend to everyone if it weren't for the great performances. Nile Rodgers is a master of his craft and Nathan East is just such a smooth player, but the more I've listened to the work, the drumming, especially by Omar Hakim, is absolutely stellar. I think my favorite musical assembly is Touch, as I suggested earlier, but I love Contact and Giorgio By Moroder, and the string intro for Beyond is a fantastic opening salvo to the rest of the song. I can't really speak to how effective the lyrics are because of whatever my condition is, but they feel honest and it turned out I enjoy the sound of vocoders, at least on occasion. Even Julian Casablancas' guest spot on Instant Crush fits the style to a T. Plus the key change modulation in Within... I just can't get enough.

 

Anyway, if you haven't ever given it a spin, go find this on your listening destination of choice and give it a chance. I know a few of you are already on board, but still. This album was transformational to my listening habits.

 

Daft Punk wasn't an important part of my listening for years, and I still haven't given a deep dive to their other work, but this album was so important to me by itself that I'm thankful they did it. Thanks, robots: painters in my mind.

Reposted from Facebook. At least here, I have an expectation of low engagement.

On Electronics Servicing, or: How I Saved $50 By Building Two Amplifiers And Buying Test Equipment

 

Back in August of 2014, my Ampeg SVT-3 Pro head had developed this strange scratchy sound that didn’t prevent playing to come through but was audible enough that it was annoying. I reached out to a local electronics repair shop that is an Ampeg authorized service center to ask for them to take a look at it, to avoid having to buy a replacement. For a $50 bench fee, they told me they wanted to reflow the solder on the input jack. Another $50 later, and I had an amplifier that was still doing the thing I took it to them to solve. I may be misremembering the conversation some, but my recollection is that, when I called them to let them know the work didn’t solve the problem, they told me it’d be another $50 diagnostic fee because the repair they did wasn’t at fault. I declined that service, partly because spending unforeseeable quantities of money on diagnosing a piece of equipment that, at the time, was 19 years old and was still available brand new from the company seemed dumb, but also because I knew they didn’t value my business. I don’t say that to disparage them, so much as to say that my first-time customer status combined with a mystery rinky dink problem that didn’t affect a moneymaking enterprise pretty understandable doesn’t rate with the only factory-authorized service center on the north side of DC for a lot of brands. Also, my sense of work ethic resented being given back something that was just as broken as it was when I took it there. Again, I get that they probably don’t have time to let something sit powered on for a few minutes to see what it does, but it still didn’t sit well with me.

 

It was around that time that I decided to build my first desktop computer. Electronics components have been compared to LEGO, so I think that’s where the itch started: selecting parts to work together to produce a coherent whole has been something I’ve enjoyed my whole life as far as I know, and by the time I had made it to 2016, I had started to lean more heavily into diagnostic and repair tasks. This was the year of the processor thefts from classrooms, and reading part numbers off processors, while not impressive in any meaningful way, isn’t really all that far removed from identifying ICs and diodes and so on. I also started to watch a youtube channel that specialized at the time in tearing down power tools, which started to show me a world of materials selection versus cost and was especially helpful in formulating strategies for identifying suspect components for failure based on environment, location, and device type. It was here that I built my first test component (an equivalent series resistance meter for measuring capacitor performance) and bought my first ‘good’ multimeter (a Chinese domestic market Fluke recommended for ‘hobbyist’ low voltage DC circuits, of the types that I found myself wanting to fix most often). Then came the Tektronix 317, a vacuum tube-driven oscilloscope that I knew would need some refresh work. That led to buying a $10 surplus Tektronix 465 from work, and then fixing them both with a Tek 2336 that I managed to convince myself to sell on after fixing its latches with a 3D printed part I learned software well enough to draw up the model for myself. At that point, I got myself a broken Ampeg PF-500 class D amplifier that was sold parts/as-is that I managed to resurrect by tracing the circuit back from the known-blown power transistors and identifying failed components, to include the class D driver IC, before deciding to build my own Fender 5F1 Champ clone amplifier. That turned into a commission for a second one, and before you knew it, I had built up enough skills and equipment to be able to turn my attention to this project that professionals decided not to take seriously. This was good, because in the intervening two years, the amplifier had also started to completely lose sound output periodically and intermittently, which seemed to be, in my opinion, “bad.”

 

I started with the obvious-to-me, by removing the circuit boards from the chassis and reflowing ALL of the solder joints. I figured “hey, this is what the professionals said would help!” It did not. I started to read over forum posts and, of course, the first thing everyone says is “replace the tubes!” That also did not do anything. Buying tubes is fun, though, so at least there was that. I started digging a little further, trying various combinations of search terms, when the first This Is A Major Issue With These Amplifiers came up: poor bias on the power output transistors due to changes in position or something of the biasing trim pot, a device that Ampeg’s parent company apparently decided to cheap out on when selecting parts.

 

That’s when I found out the original 1995 power mosfets were so poorly matched that one of them was barely on while one was near the top of the adjustment range. There was no way to get them to operate together at a bias level that was unlikely to create crossover distortion at low volume levels. This was when I learned about a couple of things: transistor biasing, and parts catalogs and datasheets. I ran through Mouser for output devices and ordered a testing device that let me attempt to match them at their turn-on voltages. I did a bunch of charting, selected the eight closest devices, and got to installing. Now the amp biases correctly! The voltages you’re supposed to measure to determine current flow are all within two millivolts instead of spreading over 23. The amp just sort of generally sounded and felt better at low volumes... and within a few weeks, I had my next cutout, which meant that my root problem was still with me.

 

By this time, I had developed a bit more experience with both high voltage tube circuits owing to my experience building the two Champs, and with using a schematic to do diagnostics. Using my digital oscilloscope revealed something I didn’t see with my analog scope, that the power board’s tube plate voltage circuit had weird periodic sag issues and a lot of noise. I went ahead and replaced the filter capacitors and the power transistor that regulates voltage in that part of the circuit, and lo and behold, now my tube gain knob seems to work the way it did when I started playing this amp back circa 2002. Cool, another tired transistor out and some fresh electrolytics, and I seem to have further smoothed out the sound. And then a week after that, another cutout.

 

At this point, having had a series of repair dramas with a bass guitar as well, I am close to saying “okay, one last go at this and then it’s on to class D. It won’t sound the same to me, but I can’t keep going like this.” I had figured out previously that the cutouts were only happening at low volume levels (I could shake a stage for an hour, but practice downstairs was a problem), I knew that it was more likely to happen with the tube drive knob below 12:00, and I knew it seemed to be more common when the amp and room were cold, but sometimes it could come up after a stretch of time playing without any problems. I also knew, because the amp has a line output, that the problem was at the very least on the very end of the preboard signal chain or somewhere on the power board.

 

I’m glad I gave it one more chance.

 

Deciding that this was going to take some serious elbow grease to get to the bottom of, I decided I needed to devote actual, significant sit-down time to this. I set up with a device that let me record from the speaker output, and found out that, yep, the problem is between preamp and power amp. Then I found a potential last stop on the pre board and decided to move my recording device to the preamp out/power amp in loop, which, if that were fine, would require the fault to be on the power board for certain. It was fine. So at this point, I take the power board back out and clean the contacts in those jacks - I was going to replace the jacks outright, but the modern parts are a slightly different physical package - because they use their bridging pins to route signal. Cleaning didn’t fix the issue despite THAT being a common forum suggestion, so onward with technology. This time around, I decided to scope it before and after every stage from the last 12AX7 tube on the preamp. No problems at all between points, so I’m at a total loss when not only does it keep happening, but it seems to have gotten worse. (Aside: I just realized that I had closed my vent a little bit so that we’d have more HVAC pressure into the upper floors. This reduction in temperature was almost certainly the cause of the worsening symptom, not anything internal or what I was doing.)

 

So the sound cuts out one more time and, out of some degree of frustration and a greater degree of lack of options, I do what everyone who has been working on the same problem for five years does: percussive maintenance. And what do you know? The sound cut back in.

 

Oh ho ho! I have an electromechanical issue... I assumed at this point that it’s not crusty soldering, and so it must be either a failing component or a failing jack. I have the scope out still, so I hook up to the output of the last tube and to the inputs of the power mosfets... still signal in both places, so I move to the outputs of the mosfets... still signal there, so I look at the schematic and there’s only one more component in the signal chain: the output protection relay. With scope on mosfet output and the positive binding post, I start playing and BLAMMO - cutout with signal before the relay but not after. I also know now that if you have a nonconductive maintenance implement (read: chopstick), you can tap suspect components with it to see what happens. I know this because, some months ago, I did this song and dance with the tubes. So tappy tap tap - sound comes right back in.

 

This is where understanding how electronics LEGO works comes back in. Unlike the output mosfets and the voltage control transistor, or the electrolytic capacitors, the original Ampeg part is totally obsolete and unavailable anywhere. One parts site that looks like it was last updated in 2002 lists a newer T9S or something part number on the picture next to Ampeg’s part number, which is also obsolete and unavailble... so now I have to figure out what the right replacement part is. I pulled a datasheet for the last known Ampeg part and go digging on Mouser and Digikey and eventually come up with a suitable replacement, once I learned what a relay having contacts in form-C actually meant and realized that the reason the original relays are obsolete is that the contact materials have been changed and they no longer sell open air relay units, instead preferring sealed devices (aside: I believe the original relay failed because of corrosion on the moving contact and surface ablation on the static contact, issues which perhaps the new materials will prevent and being sealed definitely will prevent).

 

And so yesterday, I replaced that relay. For the first time since probably 2013 or 2014 overall, and certainly the first time in a winter in at least that long, I was able to sit down, play at low volume, hear no weird distortions, develop no unwanted noise, and experience no random intermittent signal drops. I don’t know if the relay was the problem all along, and if I had been able to devote the time and energy to the diagnostics I did that one long day earlier, I might have been able to do this sooner. But I have an amp that, at 25 years old, pulls hard again and sounds better than I have heard it in a long, long time.

 

All of this is to say that, given the prospect of being asked to pay for lazy treatment twice, I’ve ended up learning a ton about repair, diagnostics, parts cannoneering, electronic component failure modes, and the value of smacking something with an intermittent failure. I’m happy with the immediate outcome, assuming I make it through the next few weeks without any more issues at all... but more importantly, I’m proud at how much I’ve learned in that time, and what I believe I’m capable of fixing now that I wouldn’t have even thought I could try, let alone succeed at. Which I think the takeaway here is probably not “if someone asks you to pay $100 to not fix your widget, buy an electronics repair lab, fix equipment for that lab, fix a different amplifier, build two other amplifiers, build some other test equipment, and then get mad at your widget and hit, thus revealing its secret” necessarily... but man, what a value I feel like I got from that trip to the shop.