Packed up some gear and waddled over town for a little walk around last week. Fog and the night. Maybe some of my spooky Edgar Allen Poe uncertainties returning. So fun to experience the feel of the Harbor at the time of day/night.
As many people know, I am not one to talk much about photo technical stuff. Especially now with the digital revolution, which continues to befuddle me. Too many things to know for such a small brain. I had film down pretty well and then it mostly went away.
However, some of my old film equipment miraculously works with the more newfangled digital cameras that seem to be reinvented every fifteen minutes. One such wonderful item is my outstandingly magnificent Canon, 50mm, F1.0 lens.
Now, for those of you who could care less about all this terminology, I apologize. For others, you may find this interesting. The F1.0 “50” is an extremely “fast” lens that is no longer manufactured. When it was first built, it was Canon's attempt at “putting it in the face” of Nikon. Blam! Here it is. Go fish! It's pretty massive glass.
The wide open F1.0 aperture, i.e., widest lens opening, allows huge amounts of light to reach the film plane, or in today's photo world, the place where all the pixels form. I bought it many years ago when I was doing a lot of photography at Goudy & Stevens Shipyard, in very low light, at the bottom of steel boats — a place I called “welders' world.” I needed to make photos in all but total darkness. This was the lens.
Goudy & Stevens went out of business, but I kept my special lens.
The photo above was made at the wide open F1.0 setting with an exposure 1/25th of a second, hand held. ASA (film speed term), now ISO, 400.
Easy work for this old lens.