Jim Stahr has a Different Year

Click on pics to enlarge, then come back.  I was gifted a Holga pinhole lens Christmas. I put this $25 dollar lens on my state of the art DSLR in an attempt to break the boredom of my head cold.  I took multiple exposures at some of my favorite shooting locations. A real reason for milk water effects! I let the wife drive because of my meds. 1/3 second exposure. Shorter exposure allows for more color.  Fixed aperture, fixed focus. All one can do is set shutter speed and shoot, giving you an image equal to the worst 110 instamatic or the best Instagram filter. 1 second exposure. Longer exposure, more definition. By the end of the session I was able to find reasonable shutter speeds, bringing back film days of light metering and strobe charts.   I was also using live view  for the first time as it was difficult to see anything through the viewfinder.  All in all, I may use this quite a bit as an educational device and a toy.  I increased contra

I'm a huge fan of Christmas. I'm not a fan of huge Christmases. I've enough years that I'm no longer offended by the superstitions of religion and tradition the surround the holiday. Indeed, I'm as likely to explain the importance of those legends as I am to point out they are logically refutable. I can now see the stories without literally believing in fantasy worlds. The pageantry that surrounds Christmas still escapes me, though. My mother trained me to expect the "big gift" to be the last one presented, sometimes finding it as I climbed in my bed. Thankfully this doesn't happen to such an extreme, so I'm not teetering on edge all Christmas. There were years when my wife and my mother seemed to be in competition. The tree's circumference of gifts rivaled its height. Many of those Christmases were marred with bored (or scowling) faces that were required to open more gifts, with no time left to play with them. It was pronounced if a chil

Still  searching  for words.

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