I know I promised pictures of the wild hipster here next, but tonight ended up being a long fight with laundry and the kitchen sink. My arms are tired, and so are my hands. So here are some nice pictures of clouds, which I don’t have to think about too hard.
I dealt O.K. with not having a camera most of the time. I kinda had to, as with the move and everthing, I simply couldn’t afford a new one. I carried my nikon, made a few pictures here and there, and mostly just waited. Then, there was another trip. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do a real trip with just my iphone, a film camera, and a few rolls of film, so I rented another camera, this time the Fuji XT-1. The first couple hours were a complete love-fest. It’s a great little camera, and I do mean little. Smaller than my Xpro by a smidge. The EVF, the main thing I was worried about, wasn’t laggy at all, it seemed, and fine enough to make compositions on. Signifigantly better than the EVF of the Xpro. Also, ergonomically, it’s a slam dunk. I was able to get it up and running in about five minutes of fiddling: turn off auto review, turn off beeping, turn on RAW, forget and then remember to turn off the focus assist light. After a little while, I set up the custom screen setting. There are half a dozen or so things I like to know at a glance; the battery level, the exposure setting and ISO, focus distance, exposure comp, stuff like that. No histograms. No gridlines. Anyway, I shot with the camera over a long weekend. Not enough to really live with it, but long enough to get a feel for it, anyway. When it came down to it, there really wasn’t enough difference for me to justify buying one over another Xpro. I liked it, but there wasn’t a signifigant difference in the things that mattered to me. First is shutter lag; they’re both excellent as long as you’re prefocused. Focus itself is a bit faster on the newer body, of course, but not fast enough to make a difference outside a sports stadium (and incidentally, the only long lens I own is manual). In low light, the XT was a bit better, maybe a stop, but it’s hard to say without doing a side by side test. The real killer is the viewfinder. Yes, the EVF is really good, better than any I’ve used so far. It still lags a little bit; optical viewfinders never do. Also, I really like the rangefinder style. You get a little more around the edges, yes, and there’s a bit of parralax error, but that helps. Somehow it makes visualization more real. More about the vacation in the next post, were there will be actual photos of hipsters in austin.
My wife told me this morning that she’d finally understood my waking up process. She said it was like the whole world outside was on fire, and I was sitting there, just saying to myself, “Fuck it.” This is it exactly. For the first half an hour I’m awake, if that half hour is before 10 in the morning, I wouldn’t care if the whole world burned if I could get a few more hours (minutes?) of sleep. There’s a little part of me, though, that is always thinging about looking for a fire extinguisher somewhere. Eventually that part wins out, and I go face the day as well as I can. Or sometimes it doesn’t, I go back to sleep, and have a mental health day. I need those, I suppose, to assure myself that the world isn’t actually burning.
Get back from Yosemite. Shower. Nap? maybe. Go to the party for Amiee and Sarah’s approximate birthday party. Approximate, because it was somewhere between their two birthdays, if I recall correctly. I know this is a lot of photos, but I was having a hard time picking, and Sophia pointed to my copy of Salgado’s Genesis, a 500 page tome of a book, and says, “Why choose? He didn’t.” She’s right. So, here are nearly all the pictures that were fit to publish.
There’s a moment in every trip where I know it’s over, and the rest is just making my way home. I always wish the trip would last longer. No matter how long I’ve been on the road, it always seems that I’m just getting my footing, and then I have to leave.
Copyright © 2008-Forever, Matt Mills.
