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Foto.Feola.Friday for January 2, 2025
Still don't know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild, a million dead-end streets and
Every time I thought I'd got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet
So I turned myself to face me
But I've never caught a glimpse
Of how the others must see the faker
I'm much too fast to take that test
Ch-ch-changes
(Turn and face the strange)
Ch-ch-changes
(Don't want to be a richer man)
Ch-ch-changes
(Turn and face the strange)
Ch-ch-changes
(Just gonna have to be a different man)
Time may change me
But I can't trace time
Foto.Feola.Friday
One of the countless curiosities of my very odd brain is that my memory works a lot like railroad tracks. If I’m trying to remember a lyric or a line from literature or some data architecture I’m working my way through, I just back up to a part I do remember, and soon my brain is trundling down those same tracks again.
Occasionally those tracks surprise me, remind me that I’d been this way before. Happened this week when I grabbed my 7artisans 7artisans 50mm F0.95. It’s a $200 knockoff of the legendary Costs More Than Your Car Leica Nokton, made possible by patent expirations and the miracle of modern CAD/CAM lens production.
I’ve been shooting color exclusively on film for the last few years; I find I just can’t bear the computer-processed look of modern Bayer color digicams. But I needed a color image and didn’t have time to wait for the film turnaround. So I grabbed the Nokton knockoff, and remembered another track I’d been trundling down before I jumped both feet back into film:
Offset the artificial computerized sharpness of digicams with old-school optics. I have the Nokton; my Nikkor-Q.C 13.5cm f/3.5, which is apparently from the 1952-53 production run; my complete set of Pentax Auto 110 lenses, including the legendary 70mm; and an Olympus Zuiko Auto-S 35mm F1.8 from the half-frame film Pen-F of the 1960s.
I even have a few lenses I bought and never tried out because I got distracted by film: an Olympus Zuiko Auto-T 135 F3.5; and a Canon 50mm F1.8 that came with a Canon T70 camera thrown in. Somehow I’ve never shot anything Canon, which is especially odd since the Army issued us Canon F-1 kits. Which none of us used.
Here’s the Pen-F with the 7Artisans F0.95.
And more images with the Nokton knockoff. It’s manual focus, and the depth of field makes a razer look fat. What it isn’t is that sterile computer processed Bayer look.
Next on Perfecting Equilibrium
Sunday, April 27th — Building an AI Powered Virtual Newsroom Part II: Prompt Engineering Deep Dive—We’ve found a way to build Virtual Newsroom, a set of low and no-cost tools that can fertilize the flowering of thousands of new newsrooms. We want to make it viable for individual journalists and small teams to successfully cover, say, a small town or school district with nothing more than a cheap laptop and an internet connection. In Part II we’re going to take the techniques discussed in Part I by doing a little journalism and walking through this in depth at the same time. We’re going to feed budgets into AIs using these prompt techniques and see how this nascent Virtual Newsroom performs.