Whadda ya’ know, it’s a new blog post, with contents roughly a month and a half in the making! 🙂
After seeing this post a ways back, I decided that I’d see to making a foray into “real” macro photography, as opposed to the soft fuzzy messes I was getting with my 16-300 Tamron “Macro.” ~45 days and a stack of adaptors from China and beyond with an EL-NIKKOR 50/2.8 from Japan, I have been able to finally bare some moist juicy macro fruit, figuratively since I haven’t attempted to take macro shots of fruit (yet.) but whatever.
Lens cap not withstanding, I think the setup looks pretty slick. There’s still a stack of M42 extension tubes and a bunch of adaptors in the mail to allow the mounting of both a standard M52 lens cap and also ring flash, but the Chinese postal service are taking their sweet time, so whatever.
Anyway, I would definitely recommend trying this! It’s surprisingly cheap! That lens was only £30 (damn good condition and built like a brick) and the stack of adaptors actually ended up costing more at ~£40 for the bunch.
Now, I digress. Why the hell does the built-in flash on a D5300 only permit a shutter of 1/200? Once those adaptors come, and those extension tubes swing in, we’re going to be in business. Assuming I can get my greasy hands (figurative, again) on a bellows so that I can focus-stack some images… that DOF is thinner than my payslips, and I don’t even get payslips!
Unrelated to above, here’s a fag on a trashcan.
Now, onward we go. University has started up once more. Here in Edinburgh, we have something called “LEARN,” it’s basically an online platform to access lecture recordings and notes and the like. As you can imagine it crashed on the first day and has crashed every day since: it wasn’t made to handle 100% online teaching, but that’s how life is.
I don’t watch or attend lectures, so it didn’t affect me as much, but it was still a little unnerving to think about the fact that students are forking over a 10% tax on their income over £25,000 for 30 years for an online degree. I am thankful the exams are online, though: fair bit of lee-way on how hard I have to study, considering I’m quite behind.
With University, the winter months have also closed in. Winter months bring longer nights and less daylight. In the words of one of my favourite anime characters whose names I have forgotten, this is ideal. I love astrophotography more than my unborn maybe-baby future child that I have yet to produce, and September has yielded some damn fine fruit already from the one clear night we’ve had!
One of the negatives of winter in Edinburgh, however, is the weather. Of the three prospective nights with 0% cloud coverage promised by Clearoutside, only one actually had 0%: the other two were crusted over by a tenuous layer of stratocumulus.
I did meteorology for a year, and by no means am I a professional. However I do believe that 0% cloud coverage means no clouds. They taught us to quote clouds in octets (fraction of sky covered by cloud in multiples of 1/8) with 8/8 being absolutely covered and 0/8 being empty. So tell me, how do you get 0% cloud coverage when the entire sky is covered? Who cares if it’s a tiny sheet of cloud, CLOUD IS CLOUD GOD DAMN IT ALL TO HELL!
I suppose I’m just salty because of the fact that I was saddled and geared for several nights. My plans to bust out the 14/2.8 for the first new night of the year were foiled by the dodgy forecasters at the Metoffice. But whatever. I get my new glasses next week, so perhaps come the next new moon I’ll actually be able to see the stars I’m meant to be shooting.
Anyhow, thanks for reading. These blog posts are hit-or-miss and I feel like this one is a miss, but I just wanted to share some pretty pictures 🙂
You can expect a (non-comprehensive) review of a gray-market D780 in the coming weeks, paired with a 28/300 35/56 Nikkor once they arrive soon >:P
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