snow

The weather here is to say the least changeable, this was taken just over a week ago from the top of our hill looking towards The Pyrenees and Spain, the week before it was 20 C today it was 22 and a beautiful sunny day.
Now at 7pm the skies are again darkening no snow but forecast to rain all next week.

The 50mm f4 lens

Yesterday as is today the weather was delightful warm and sunny so we decided to go for a walk around the lake at Marciac.  Karen has been recovering from her bout of pneumonia she is much better but still has moments of breathlessness, we walked slowly and it is was a very pleasant hours walk.  I took my camera with the 50mm Pentacon lens attached. I was very pleased with the results.

 

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180mm Carl Ziess

I tried the  180mm lens again just to see how if it was as sharp on my canon 5d as it was on the original camera a Pentacon 6 with film, it is fairly difficult to focus but when you get it right it seems ok, it didn’t help that the focusing ring is a bit stiff and the camera and lens together weigh about 6kgs.

It rained almost all day so I did’t manage to get out with the camera, autumn is my favorite time for photography so hopefully the weather will be better next week.

My dogs seemed happy to pose for me so I had to be content with them looking cute.

Great glass

I have just a brought back to France from the UK some lenses a best friend and brother in law and I bought together along with a medium format 120 film camera. Mike died four years ago who had a future as a great photographer, we had both moved over to digital and eventually Canon 5d’s, the lenses and camera had been stored away in a wardrobe and forgotten for some time. I found an adapter on ebay it  arrived this morning shipped from Hong Kong. They are east german Carl Zeiss lenses and fantastic quality, I remember the images they produced on film were superb. This photo was taken with the 180mm f 2.8, I will try them out over the next few days. I expect the images will be quite soft, of course no auto focus which is no problem I turn that off quite a lot anyway. I will have to go back to estimating the exposure which won’t be a bad thing either.

I don’t often reblog stuff, I avoided the coverage of the queens ‘celebrations’ This quite frankly made me weep

eddiegillard

At 2300 Saturday 2nd of June 2012, a coachload of Tired, untrained and ill equipped people left Bristol by coach for London and the Queens Jubilee.

At around 0240 they were dropped off by the side of a road with their Baggage and Tents and left stood for more than an hour along with 80 other people.

Having Had no sleep at 0415 these people were told that at 0500 they would be starting a 16 hour shift.

No these are not migrant workers, these are Security Staff for the Queen.

Ages ranging from 16 to 50 with one thing in common. Unpaid and on “work experience”.

Almost all of those that left Bristol last night were still not SIA qualified, Some had been told they would be paid for working and that they should “Sign Off” benefits before starting, which turned out to be a falsehood, mistake or lie…

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Spring is almost here hooray

The weather has been slowly improving over the last month here in the south west of France, its a good feeling to be coming out of winter. The days are longer, the spring flowers are nudging their heads above the ground and our bees have woken up and are foraging for the early pollen. We still have frosty mornings now and again but the air is fresh and clear with wonderful night skies. Five planets are visible this month, I haven’t seem Mercury yet but the other especially Jupiter and Venus are as bright as buttons. I will try and take some photographs this week of the night sky I have been reading up on the techniques needed but up to now it has been too cold to stand outside for very long.

April 2020 guide to the bright planets

The photo is from a walk we did last week around a lake towards the mountains, it was 10K and took us 2h 40m at a leisurely pace.