Yashica Electro GSN

This is one of my favorite shots. Taken with a Canon A2 & Fomapan 400. The GSN should be a fav or mine, but it's not. Unfortunately I caught the Nikon bug right around the time I picked up a working copy. It's a fine camera w/ a great sharp lens. Hit my flickr stream for more examples.

Mitsuwa Market Arlington Heights

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A neat little Asian market in Arlington Heights, the main attraction has gots to be the food court. Authentic, fairly cheap, and abundant Asian food - all served along with a massive crush of humanity mixed with a cacophony of noise. The real star is the takeout sushi though, it's actually fresher and tastier than a lot of sit down restaurants.

I've really grown to love a good serving of chicken feets, done right these things are the bees knees. Tender, chewy, ligament-y, all in a fragrant & delectable sauce. The best way to eat these guys is to shove a foot in your mouth and start sucking off the meat(?) without using your fingers and creating a huge mess. Then when all the meat(?) has been slurped, spit the bones on your plate and grin at the people at the next table. Not the safest method, since I constantly felt like I was going to swallow an entire bone.

These pics were taken with Fuji 400 Superia, Nikon 50mm 1.8D, and Nikon N90s. A swell little camera, it's light, fast AF, and feature packed. It was Nikon's pro-level SLR right after the F4 and between the F5. It's a great little camera to carry around if you don't feel like doing the whole manual focus thing.

A Snowy Day In Chicago-Town

The first big snowstorm of the year. I'm just trying to get outside of my comfort zone (tight portrait-style shots) and stretch myself a bit. I used the flash to illuminate the snow falling in front of the pole and metered about in the middle of the pole. Which was just enough light to avoid seriously overexposing the light bulb. It was still way overexposed, I added a burn layer in PS to turn it down a notch.

Nikon D700 @ ISO 200, spot metered
Nikkor 200mm f/4 AI (manual focus)
Speedlight SB-25 @ 1/16 manual (zoom to 135mm)

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Need to work on landscapes

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-details: Nikon D700, 80-200mm f/4.5 AI.

Landscapes - I really need work on them. Even when I start out trying a landscape (using my 24mm), I end up shooting the weeds @ 200mm. I simply don't visualize things in a landscape setting. I keep wanting to squeeze my shots into a normal or short tele- range. I've been using the 85mm 1.8 so much that I've been feeling a little constrained by it, maybe constrained isn't the right word. Overused. Struggling for inspiration. So I guess a partial New Years resolution is to try and see things differently. Look at life through a wide-angle lens.

Nikon F4s with MB-21 drive/battery pack

Nikon F4s with MB-21 drive/battery pack, originally uploaded by I_Take_Pitchers.

Here is the last camera I'll buy in 2009. I swear it. I really mean it this time, although I'd love to try out a Leica CL.
I literally stole this off eBay, paying roughly $80 for an all-time classic camera that really deserves it's reputation as one of the best 35mm bodies ever.
After shooting 3-4 rolls on this thing, I can unabashedly state that I love this camera! It's an absolute dream to handle, it weighs a ton (a good thing when compared to today's plastic SLRs).

Nikon FG

This camera was acquired through the online auction house. You know, that one. The included Series E 50mm 1.8 was the only reason I bought it, the auction listing actually said that the body was non-working and was for parts/repair only. But, $35 isn't terribly bad for a Series E lens so I went ahead and got it. It turns out the light meter does NOT activate on the Bulb (B) or Manual (1/90s) settings. This is what the previous owner had the shutter set to. Once I loaded some batteries it was working perfectly. In fact, except for the light seals the body is in fabulous condition.

Some quick thoughts:

-this is the first manual focus Nikon I've owned. The Type K focussing screen (with split image rangefinder) absolutely blew me away. This is head and shoulders better compared with other focussing screens I've used (mostly on M42 Pentax screw mounts). Really stellar, it's a snap to get perfectly crisp focused shots.

- Program mode seems to work pretty well. You just set your F-stop to the smallest value (highest F number) , focus, and shoot. The onboard computer calculates the best aperture and shutter for you. From an amateur's perspective it seems to underexpose ever so slightly, but what the hell do I know? I try not to use this feature a lot, if I wanted automatic operation I would just take out my Canon DSLR.

- This was one of Nikon's quote-unquote budget line SLRs, meaning they were using plastic for some components. While this has some drawbacks, one big plus is that it's really light and is perfect for carrying around all day. Especially if you've got the 1.8 Series E lens, you could carry this for hours and forget you had it on you.

- even though there is some plastic here, the build quality still feels really superb. I'm guessing it could take a fair amount of abuse and still come out fine. I recently took it on a week long trip to Costa Rica, see pics here:

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.