The Paradox

Photography

Marine animals ~ Insects ~ Other animals ~ Plants ~ People ~ Places ~ Things ~ Experiments

fun with my new telephoto zoom lens

My camera is a great old fully manual Pentax, the Spotmatic F. And by fully manual I mean I've run it for a year with a dead battery. Take that you automation freaks! And yeah, it's a lot heavier than modern cameras. On the other hand, it's already somewhere around 30 years old, and it'll probably last me another 30 years easily, unlike the modern plastic-cased cameras that need replacing after only a few years. And the steel body means that I can beat off a mugger with it then take his picture afterward for the police :-)

I have a decent selection of lenses, though they can be tricky to find because my selection is limited to whatever the used camera shop has on hand - thread mount lenses are rarely made anymore, and those that are new are apparently very expensive.

I finally found a 90-230mm zoom, though, so between that and my wide-angle (35mm), normal (55mm), and telephoto (135mm) lenses and the doubler, I'm doing pretty well.

What I really wish for, though, is my own darkroom, so I can play some more. I took a photography course in grade 9, and had tons of fun with it. Until I have the space for a darkroom, though, I'll have to settle for 1-hour developing.

I also want to get back into black and white photography, to go along with the darkroom fun. Or maybe it's the other way around. Even though colour darkrooms aren't stupidly expensive like they used to be, I just want to play with black and white. Colour I'll leave to the 1-hour labs.