Note to self: live in the moment
Aug 7th, 2008 by handolio
Yeah, I know, it sounds like self-help bullshit, but allow me to explain. Last night saw a cracking thunderstorm over Brighton. It lasted for maybe three hours, with a good couple of hours of forked lightning and proper pyrotechnics.
I was trying to work. Consequently, by the time I’d finally realised that it was a special, once-in-five-years sort of a storm, it had retreated eastwards a bit and started to look less dramatic - witness lack of said lightning and pyrotechnics in the above. I spent an hour hand-holding photos on the office 400D, but I should have been outside doing it properly with a tripod and my FE2.
And here’s the thing. After last year, when circumstances saw me stuck inside freelancing on almost every fine weekend of the summer, I vowed I wasn’t going to miss out on the best of Brighton through work. I’ve been sticking to that at the weekends, but I realise last night was a slip-up: I should have been soaked through, on the beach, trying to keep the camera dry and get the perfect shot.
I’m angry at myself that I wasn’t. I know someone who would have made sure I was.
Still, last night’s pictures (I’ll put more on Flickr later) made me realise why shots from the 400D look disappointingly soft: it’s that damn kit lens. It never quite looks in focus, and focusing manually last night I discovered that it never is - touching it is enough to affect the sharpness; there’s more play in the mechanism than my 50mm Nikon lens, and that’s been dropped more than once.
Another irritating quirk is that, unlike any other lens I’ve used, turning the focusing ring to its stop doesn’t bring it to an infinite focus - you have to back it off a fraction to get a sharp picture. I’d been shooting for ages before I realised.
cool photos - bad Si for not getting more/better/from the beach photos too.
If you want, we can phone you up and shout at your everytime we’re aware of something interesting happening in Brighton/Hove until you eventually crack and stop working yourself quite so damn hard and start enjoying life a bit more..?
I was dragged down to the beach during the storm, and found myself standing two metres in front of the West Pier. Metal+Water+Lightning=Deep-Fried-Rain-Soaked Idiot. Yes it was beautiful. Yes, you should have been there, but mostly because you could have brought me a camera, my fancy touch-my-designer-face-that’s-a-bollocks-replacement-for-buttons phone having run out of cu@#ing electrcity, again, so I have only my second-rate recollections of the eye-to-brain-of-diminished-capacity type. If it’s not on Flickr it’s just a bunch of wanky synapse-farts in my silly old Memorex. Wet shoes and soggy pants for a shaft of pissing light in the non-digital eye then. Maybe I’ll write a shitty poem or paint a crappy picture of it all for you. Next time, you ignore the basic human instinct to seek shelter and let the sky piss all over your face, and I’ll get the half-arsed photos from my window, eh>?
Deal, whoever you are