Undergeared...

Me heading out the door to lunch on Friday: “It’s 28 degrees out there. I won’t be doing outdoors photography. The 17-55mm/2.8 will be plenty.”

Me five minutes later slowly creeping up on a squirrel with the camera in front of my face:

With the 1.6x crop factor of a Canon APS-C sensor, the lens has an equivalent field of view to a 27-88mm zoom on a full frame camera. That 88mm is on the short end of telephoto length, fine for portraits but way too short for wildlife. 

Starting with that upper photo from probably a dozen feet away, I had to slowly inch my way up to maybe double-arm's-length to get the lower shot.

Happy Dashers

Getting more photos from the Drumstick Dash processed. Here are some of my faves thus far...

'Tis the Seasonal...

Stepped out the front door at 8:57AM this morning to go shoot photos of the Drumstick Dash. I could hear the countdown for the 9:00AM start from the front porch as I walked to my observation spot, which is at the two mile mark of the 4.6 mile course.

It was 34°F outside when I left the house, and we're still early enough in the season where that feels pretty darn cold. By the first week of February, anything above freezing'll feel like sunbathing weather, but today I was regretting not switching out the cotton socks for the wool socks in my dresser drawer by about 9:30. With good wool socks, the waterproof Merrell Moab shoes I wear in winter are good enough to wear well down into the 20s, but standing around on asphalt, the cotton tube socks just weren't hacking it for insulation.

I took the Canon EOS 40D with the EF 70-200mm f/4L IS zoom lens as well as my usual EOS-1D Mark IV, and even though the 40D is seventeen years old and can be had for less than a hundred bucks these days, I was pretty happy with the first few shots I've processed.

Postings...

• Super badass twin turbo V-8 ragtop Benz.


• Resurrecting a camera.

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Processing

"Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you." -Satchel Paige

Yesterday was the Monumental Marathon here in Indianapolis. Like last year, I pedaled my bicycle up to the intersection of 58th Street and College Avenue, which is the closest good vantage point. (And it is a good one! The runners are coming right at you as the course heads east on 58th before turning north on College.)

This year I shot the race with the Oly E-M1X. I had a choice of a fast lens or a long one, and chose the long one. Until the sun started peeping through the clouds, I kept it in aperture priority at ISO 400, shooting in the f/5.6-6.3 range. It left me wanting a fast, long lens.

Still culling through the images, hoping for a real winner or two.

Here are the runners headed north on College Avenue.

Link Stuff...

• Early '00s Aston Martins were such good looking cars.


• Writing with style!


• Motorcycle roadtrip through Vietnam...

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Vote or GTFO

I paused my morning activities of cleaning some pistols for photography to go take a picture.

Go and thou do likewise.

Elsewhere...

• Shooting a Triumph TR-3A in action with a Nikon D800 in color and B&W...


• A '66 Impala Sport Coupe with a rat rod vibe.

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Squirrel!

As foliage thins on the trees, squirrel photography season really gets into gear for me. I'm a lot more likely to use longer zooms as my walking-around lens. These were with the 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II on the Nikon D300S. That's the equivalent of a 300mm focal length on a full-frame camera.

You don't get these shots with a cell phone.

Torn...

Some dude has put together a book of a bunch of Army uniform photos from Natick Soldier Systems Center dating from the early Seventies to about the Gulf War, and the nerd in me wants to buy it, but I'm not sure I want to buy it this badly...

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Tab Clearing...

• The only skyscraper designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is up for sale. Opening bid is only six hundred grand! It has a really baller penthouse apartment with built-in furnishings designed by Wright, too. I dunno what the nightlife is like in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, but I bet you can see clear to the horizon.


• How do you say "Join the army or go to jail" in Russian?


• Try something new. You might have a good time!

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Elsewhere...

• Pictures are no good if you can't find them.


• By 1970, the Mustang was already fattening up to hibernate through the Malaise Era.

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Elsewhere...

• Hey, let me tell you about that time I screwed up the photography opportunity of a lifetime because I didn't know what I didn't know!


• 1990 Caddy Fleetwood coupe...

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Super New

The more mature a technology is, the harder it is to release a really jaw-dropping product:

So even if the engineers manage to improve an already near-perfect model, the new camera will not really be all that different.

That is exactly what happened in case of the Nikon D6: Like the D5, it still is a lighting-fast camera, it still has incredible high ISO performance and it still is indestructible. On top of that, the autofocus was improved significantly, but no one really took note of that, as the D5 was already practically infallible.

It is important to understand that major breakthroughs in physical engineering are far less likely to happen and if they do happen, they often go relatively unnoticed.

Always keep the Pareto-principle in mind: An improvement of 20% requires 80% of total development resources and is neither needed nor noticed by 80% of all users.

Hammer Time

I love watching the work in the blacksmith shed at the State Fair!

You can tell there's a lot of camaraderie among the folks swinging the hammers and shaping steel.

Plus the forges make for some dramatic pics...

Thresher

It's that time again!

Milking shorthorn ox.

Percheron.

Blacksmithing.

Woodworking.

Rat Bikes

Of all my cameras, the Olympus E-M1X is easily the least fossil-y. It was announced in January of 2019, meaning it's barely over five years old; a spring chicken among the stringy old hens and roosters in my camera coop. They're still available new-in-the-box, although used copies are only about a third the price of a new one.

Still, although it was announced in 2019, it uses the same Sony-manufactured 20MP LiveMOS Four Thirds sensor first introduced in the 2016-vintage OM-D E-M1 Mark II, albeit backed up with dual TruePic VIII image processors, which gets it close to at least honorary fossil status.

Tab Clearing...

• "These aren't my pants."


• Looking at your old photos.


• The Great Deterioration of Local Community Was A Major Driver of The Loss of The Play-Based Childhood

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Small is Beautiful

An all-in-one "walking around" zoom lens is what's normally on my cameras. I like them because they're more versatile than a fixed focal length lens and have more reach than the typical 24-70mm pro zoom. (They don't have as much reach as a superzoom. In non camera nerd speak, these are "5X" rather than "10X" zooms.) 

The lack of focal length, however, is made up for by much better optics as well as larger available apertures over the most of the range of the lens. For instance, my favorite Nikon full-frame superzoom, the 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6, has a maximum aperture of f/3.5 at 28mm, while the 24-120mm f/4 VR is a third of a stop slower. But by the time you've zoomed out to 50mm, the 28-200 can only manage f/4.5, while the 24-120 will hold f/4 all the way out to 120mm.

The bigger hole lets in more light, allowing you to use lower ISOs or faster shutter speeds indoors or in the shade.

These lenses tend to be compact, but still fairly chonky, and that's one reason that smaller sensor cameras still appeal to me.

Thanks to the magic of crop factor, these are the equivalent lenses for full-frame, APS-C, and Micro 4/3rds:

• Nikon 24-120mm f/4 VR: 84x103.5mm, 710g
• Fuji 16-80mm f/4 OIS WR: 78x89mm, 440g
• Panasonic 12-60mm f/2.8-4: 68-86mm, 320g

That Micro 4/3rds lens on the Olympus, seen in the photo above, is almost an inch shorter, about a half inch smaller in diameter, and less than half the weight of the full-frame Nikon, yet it covers the same effective field of view and is a full stop brighter on the wide end, to boot. 

That's just shy of a pound's weight difference between the Nikon and Panasonic glass, and you notice that when it's hanging around your neck during a long day.

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