I’ve been out for the better part of a month; some covid variant, I guess. It was messing with my lungs, and I had a slight fever for weeks every time I exerted myself physically, so I had to essentially stay put and wait for things to get better. I lost September somewhere. The symptoms were reasonably mild, but persistent, and I didn’t feel like pulling the devil by the tail.

When I got better, I got myself a new lens to motivate myself to go out more and take pictures. It’s a Sony FE 50mm f/1.8, the cheapest and lightest 50mm for the system, and I like it a lot, since a heavy lens would be pointless for me – what good is the best image quality in the world if it’s so impractical I always leave it at home and take all the pictures with the iPhone, which makes everything look like crap? With this one, I get excellent image quality with very few compromises, and I can still use shallow depth of field for closeups.

Yeah, the autofocus is pretty awful, but I don’t care much, since I’m not shooting sports. That’s what I always had difficulties explaining to people on photographic forums: I don’t actually care for autofocus or some weird gimmicky features on the spec sheet. I care for things that matter for the kind of pictures I’m taking – smooth bokeh, tonal depth, color quality, dynamic range, landscape detail etc. I will nitpick forever over the things that matter to me, and just brush off stuff that doesn’t. I used to change cameras quite frequently before technology of the early digital cameras caught up with what I wanted, but once Canon 5d came out, I held on to it for decades and Biljana still uses it now. Now I’m using Sony A7II for I don’t know how long, 8 years or something. Those things became really, really good somewhere around 2006, and I simply don’t need the new and improved version. I did, however, need some motivation to start taking the camera with me again, and I guess I need to buy something new every now and then to change my perspective enough to make it worthwhile to take pictures, because shooting the same things gets old quickly.