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.
I’ve had the iPad 4 since its release, and I haven’t done much photography with it in a long time. But now, here’s an important observation related to photographing with that device. Solely because of its large display, all the photos I took with it were stunningly beautiful, framed with joy and pleasure. That large retina display is the reason the impressions created by the landscapes of the mountain peaks above Baška and Stara Baška on the island of Krk were largely captured in their original appearance.
Why endure the hardship of small LCD screens on cameras?
Long ago, before all this digital technology, when tube TVs were still normal devices, there was a comment published somewhere about the size of the screen on which something is displayed and viewed. The explanation went something like this: If you watch the horror movie "Friday the 13th" in a cinema on a big screen, it will engage you emotionally much more and leave a greater impression than if you watched the same movie on an old tube TV. And if you watched "Friday the 13th" on a Casio wristwatch, which was produced at the time, you wouldn’t really feel the same fright compared to watching it in a cinema.
Does anyone use the option of connecting a camera to large tablet devices like an iPad for framing shots?
The connection would be: if you're looking at a magnificent scene in nature that takes your breath away and annihilates every other thought in your mind, and if there is a technical format that can freeze that moment into a photograph which can bring you closest to the original experience, why isn’t that used as the standard?
I don't care much for either composing or reviewing pictures on the screen, only the viewfinder, and even then it's mostly for judging sharpness and exposure. But I'm used to doing everything in my head, because I originally shot film.
BTW I just checked, 11 out of 14 photos in the album are taken with manual focus, and probably would have been even if the AF on the camera was the best in the world, because AF just can't understand that you want to focus on those grapes through the grass, or prefocus on the rock in anticipation of the wave.