The Story of Left Over Holiday Candy

Does this look familiar?

PoTd - April 3rd

Sign Language

A sign that seems to be everywhere these days.

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Pic-of-The-Day - April 2nd

The Watcher

Summer on the upper Niagara River, in Fort Erie.

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PoTd - April 1st

Summer Dreaming

PoTd (Pic-of-The-day) 'Summer Dreaming'

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  #PoTd #summer #chippawa

Easter Bunny

Canvas Easter Bunny in a Canvas Basket in front of grass grown for Easter.

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****This image has a creative commons attribution noncommercial share alike license.  You can download it share it, & use it in your own works, as long as you stick to the license rules.

Death of the missing Link

With  the new discovery of Homo naledi a while back, I started to think a bit about human origins.

There used to be an idea of the missing link between humans and ... pre-humans.
Now its' more a case of  'what came when and how did our multiple groups of ancestors  come together to create 'us'. As opposed to the old idea of  one fossil that shows evolution caught in the middle of it's work.  What would that even look like?

There are still new ancestors out there to be found (see above). Some that we aren't even looking for & some that we have genetic evidence for , but do not have confirmed physical remains for.
Like inferring a planet by the dimming &/ wobbling of a star, we can infer a branch on the family tree by having knowledge of predecessors and and antecedents?

If we are still finding preserved remains that we never expected,  how many may still be out there that we simply haven't found yet? 

Families, like the individuals they are made up of, can be messy affairs. They are rarely simple and straight forward, they are rarely one dimensional cliche's and they certainly don't do what you want, when you want.

If our modern day families are messy,& complicated and sometimes unpredictable, why would we expect our ancestors (and our ancestry) to be any different.

Sometimes when looking into your family history,  learning the unexpected can be the best part of genealogy. 'Cool, my great grandmother was native or my great great grandfather was a horse thief'.

The genealogy of our species is likely the same way.  We are made up of this group and have a branch like that, COOL!'

Old School

I should have made this post a while ago, but better late than never.

A while back I got out my old 50mm F1.8 FD (manual focus) lens & spent my afternoon off playing with this vintage lens.

The manual focus & manual aperture took a while to get used to. I couldn't get (what I considered) a reasonably good image wide open, around f8 I was happier with the sharpness of the image.  A lot of this could be do to my inexperience with type of lens. I do focus manually a fair bit with modern lenses, but this was not quiet the same thing.

Outside in full sun it was f11 or slower, not to get a sharper image, but to control the light a bit better.  It seemed to let in more light than I would expect at a given F stop and faster f stops increased the glow & bloom that seems an inherent part of shooting with this lens.

The slightly soft focus & glow/bloom are part of what makes shooting with a vintage lens unique interesting.  At the same time I tried to gain some control over how much of these characteristics where in my shots.

Aside from trying different things in camera I also tried different approaches in post processing. Some images I tried to lessen the vintage feel and make them look more like what would be expected from a modern lens. Some images I didn't compensate for the effect of the lens & a few  I even pushed the "vintage-ness" even farther.

I only spent one afternoon shooting with this lens & initially wasn't too crazy about it, but then started to enjoy playing around with it.  Shooting with a fully manual vintage lens seems a lot more alchemical than shooting with modern auto everything lenses, its' more try this, try that, a little more, a little less, be more aware of light positions, reflections etc.

It's not my new 'go to' lens, but I will be playing with it some more, when I have time to play.

FD Lens