SAR chopper

5N & FD 80-200

Just as if I had planned it, I walked there and within seconds liftoff occured.

Macro photography with a plain kit lens

Technology has advanced quite far. As much as I like my legacy manual lenses, but the minimum focus distance is at least 25 cm. Back in those days, you had to buy a macro lens, an intermediate ring or a close up lens.

The kit lens of the Nex is capable of focussing very close, so with focal length set to 55 mm and aperture closed down to 8, you can get real close. The two sides of a coin :-) shown above have been cropped only in a minor way.

Sports with manual focus lens

As I learned yesterday, it IS possible to shoot sports with a manual focus lens. The basketball game between Ratiopharm Ulm and New Yorker Phantoms (Braunschweig)  in the new Ratiopharm Arena was brightly lit with LED lighting. Light was actually so good that I could use aperture 2.8-4, ISO 100-250 with a handheld FD 100/2.8 lens (effectively 150 mm).

After an initial slow start, the Ratiopharm Ulm team worked hard to get back in the lead and suceeded in the last minutes of the game. It was very exciting, although I was partly deaf for some time due to the noise level.
For me, this was the first major basketball game I experienced and I found it to be fun. In fact, much more exciting than soccer because more goals are scored and the fouls do not tend to cripple the opponent as in soccer.

Per Günther in action

Bryant on the left

Scored

Slow start

Well, decide for yourself...

Another one

Still catching up

Dance team

 

Watts

New Yorker Phantoms charging

Swann can fly :-)

Swann and Bryant

Must be hard playing in the home town of the other team

Still in the ened of catching up

Griffin

Swann and Günther

The end

In forgers paradise

Having immersed myself into the internals of a stuck-aperture Vivitar lens, I spontaneously glued a lens element from a broken beamer onto a surplus filter ring and mounted it onto my FD lenses.

It makes those lenses so short-sighted that I used the 24 mm to get enough motive area into the picture. Moving backwards is not an option because the focus ring of the lens from 0.3 to infinity is now equal to maybe 5 mm focus range!

So it allows macro photography but has its restrictions. Since it hasn't cost anything, that is alright :-)

The level of detail is quite surprising for me, but then I am usually not a close-up photographer.

Note: Those pictures are NOT cropped.