Many good things happened, most of them caused by an increase in mental energy. The effect of the medication I stopped back in May is wearing off, and I really feel like doing stuff again!
So, what did I do?
First thing is, Janny wanted something to watch birds with, but also possibly planets and star clusters. We already have a good set of binoculars, so we thought, how about a spotting scope?
So I researched spotting scopes, but was left… underwhelmed. I know one shouldn’t expect a spotting scope of around 300 bucks to have the same optical quality as, say, a Sony G lens, but I would have expected them to be a little bit better.
One day I was absently browsing Marktplaats-ads, and stumbled across an ad that sold some camera gear including a device called “Lens2Scope”. Hmmm…
So I google that, and it turns out that this is exactly what the name suggests: a device with an ocular and a prism on one end, and a bayonet to hook up to a camera lens on the other.
It’s available for Canon, Nikon and… the Sony A-mount, which would be just what I need, since I’ve got a bunch of those! It has a 10mm ocular, so a 70-300mm lens would give us 7-30x enlargement… or my Sony G lens, with the Sigma converter, would go from 10 to 56x, which is way more than enough.
And I’m thinking that, with the 24-70/f2.8 Zeiss on it, it MIGHT be very nice to watch deeper-space objects like nebulas, maybe.
The one I bumped into in the Marktplaats ad was for the Sony A-mount, so knowing these things are around the €250 mark new, I made an offer for 100 euros, which was accepted.
Optically, this thing is surprisingly good. It has its own tripod adapter, but we’re not going to use that when we hook it up to the 1500 grams Sony G lens. But for a Sigma 70-300 APO which I scored for 40 euros, it’s plenty sturdy enough.
We haven’t been looking at anything further away than the moon, but when used with the Sigma zoom, the moon looks remarkably crisp. But when she wants something requiring serious optical quality, we can just put the Sony G on a tripod and hook up the Lens2Scope to that.
I also blew the dust off the Konica-Minolta Dynax 7d, so when Janny is using it for birdwatching, and she sees something interesting, she can simply hook the camera to the lens and snap away.
Photo processing
I got so tired with the dumbed-down version of Adobe Bridge in Photoshop Elements that I decided to splurge, and got myself an Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan. I expect to photograph a lot more now that I’m retired, so I can sort of justify that to myself, and Lightroom is a lot more powerful than anything offered by Photoshop Elements.
I fully expected Lightroom to be able to import my existing Photoshop Elements Organizer catalogue, in which I have accumulated over 22.000 photos by now. Lightroom does offer the facility to import Elements Organizer catalogs… up to database version 21.
Unfortunately, I have version 25.
I’ve been trying to work with Adobe to get this resolved since June 18. When I write this, the issue has not been successfully resolved. It has been confirmed as a code issue rather than a problem with my catalog, but after the last troubleshooting session a week ago, I have yet to hear from them.
I did some troubleshooting on it myself. The Elements Organizer database is in fact a SQLite database, so I took a look at it. I don’t know the database schema, but I was able to identify the tables that have the information relevant to me, and it turns out that it leaves files out of the import, and skips metadata on ther files, for reasons that I cannot identify. Unfortunately, the import logging leaves a lot to be desired, so there is no way of figuring out why the import decided to skip a file. I asked them if they could provide me with the SQL query that gets the data it uses for the input. We’ll have to see what they answer…
Apart from that (really non-minor!) issue, the workflow with Lightroom is a lot faster, and it opens up some facilities that you would want if you’re serious about photography, but that Photoshop Elements doesn’t offer.
New articles
I also wrote two new articles: one on how I photograph Janny’s paintings (which is quite a painstaking affair), and one on my poor-man’s-makeshift home photo studio setup.
I’ve been messing around with my studio gear a bit, which led to this “selfie”:
I’m pretty happpy with that one, considering the equipment it was made with.
A friend of mine has written a book, and he needs a portrait for the back cover… so seeing the above selfie, he asked me if I could do that.
I also asked my most patient model Miep the Mannequin for a session:
I would’ve asked her to be a bit more modest and lift an arm to cover up a bit. But for such a patient model, she is remarkably inflexible. 🤣
Upcoming: motorcycle trip
Janny has been telling me I’d probably like to get out on the bike a couple of days.
She’s right. Of course. She knows me well.
So in a few days, I’ll take the bike out for a four-day trip, and I am very much looking forward to that.
The nice thing about being retired is that you don’t have to take time off in advance — you can just look at the forecast and decide “yeah, Thursday is looking fine”.
