Derek won the Weekly Photo Challenge. The topic was ‘Celebrations’. His wonderful photograph is below.
My entry was a pic of the Jinju Lantern Festival last year. My photo set of the event is here
Next week’s contest is an ‘Open Challenge’, so I’ll have to drag a decent photo out from somewhere…
Well, Paul won the photo competition this week with his superb (and topical) photo of the fireman at the Namdaemun fire. No surprise.
My unsuccessful entry:
Next weeks topic: Celebrations!
I finally finished the small project of mounting my new Rokkor lens.
Not a big job, but not without some minor difficulties. I had to acquire some new tools, broke a drill bit, broke off the mount’s AF confirm chip (hooray for super-glue) and got aluminium shavings all over the kitchen table.
I’m very happy with the results. The pics so far are very satisfactory.
There is an infinity focus issue, but I’m not too worried about that, I’ll get the mount machined down in the future. In the meantime, photos of close – medium range subjects are ok.
Unfortunately I can’t use my m42 lenses now until I get another m42 – EOS adapter.
I just found out that there was a fire last night and “Korean National Treasure No.1” has been destroyed.
Tragic. Arson is suspected. I guess we’ll get more on that in the coming weeks.
Namdaemun was the southern gate of the original city of Seoul. A few details about it on Wikipedia here.
Some pics from the Korean media here and here.
The dramatic photograph above was taken by one of my fellow Seoul Photo Club members. Putting the tragedy aside, compare this photo to the ones in the news links above. There is a sense of urgency and the dramatic here, certainly a picture with a story. This is different to the pics from the media, seemingly devoid of these important elements. Good job Paul. More awesome photos of his from this incident here.
My father-in-law used to own – I say ‘used to’ because he died about 6 months or so before my wife and I met – a Minolta SLR camera from the 70s. I have an interest in old photographic equipment, especially lenses, so while I was down there during Seollal, I had a closer look at his gear. One of the lenses was of particular interest – a Rokkor 58mm f/1.2.
Just a brief diversion to explain what that means.
Rokkor is the brand name for Minolta lenses, just as Takumar is for Pentax, Nikkor for Nikon and Zuiko for Olympus. 58mm is the focal length – how much the lens sees. 50mm is considered to be pretty much what the human eye would see through the camera if there was no lens attached, so 58mm is a slight magnification of that. The close-up shots you see at sports games are typically taken with 300mm or 400mm lenses. The “f” indicates the amount of light that enters the lens. It is a complicated concept, suffice to say that the lower the number, the more light can enter the lens, the heavier the lens is and the more expensive. For a good explanation of the “f stop” concept see here.
I do a lot of low-available-light photography (I abhor using the flash), so the low “f stop” number on this lens caught my eye. I did a little research on the ‘net and discovered that this particular lens has some excellent characteristics and is highly desirable. “Great” I thought, “but can I use it on my Canon DSLR??”. The mount is the problem. 1970s Minoltas of course, have a different lens mount than a 2007 Canon. I own several Takumar (Pentax) lenses from the 50s and 60s that I can use on my camera via a special adapter so I assumed that there would be one for the Minolta. There is, but there are a couple of reasons why this particular adapter is not good, so I have to adapt an adapter to get the thing onto my camera.
The lens needed some work, it had some pretty serious fungus inside. Yesterday I took it apart and cleaned it and it came up very well. The fungus doesn’t appear to have damaged the glass at all, which is fortunate. I removed the unnecessary parts that would get in the way of the mounting and filed down where the mount will be attached. I’m going to try and appropriate an electric drill from school today so I can complete the conversion tonight.
I’m a member of the Flickr group Seoul Photo Club*. It’s a group exclusively for photos taken in Korea. Each week we have a photo challenge – the moderator selects a topic and we enter appropriate photos. This weeks topic was B&W (black and white) Open.
I didn’t win. Which is disappointing. However that’s tempered by the fact that the entries for these challenges are of a very high quality. The winner gets published in the Korea Herald, one of the English language newspapers here in Korea. I’ll get there eventually. Next week: Children and Students.
Previous winners here*.
My Photo Challenge entries here.
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Too Many Questions, Not Enough Answers 