March Madness indeed.
This has been a wild month, starting with my birthday, then a lovely visit
with my grandmother, followed by the earthquake in Japan where several of my
close friends live or have family (all are safe, thankfully), followed by my
yearly bonus and raise (which was quite a blessing) immediately followed by
my house being broken into. Beware the Ides of March! Funny enough, they
didn't touch any of my camera gear. I think the burglars were in a hurry
because our dogs were in the back yard barking their heads off, though the
thieves still made out with quite a bit of our stuff.
Anyway, everyone (including the dogs) is okay, we've beefed up security
(which was extremely lax, shame on us) and should be able to replace most of
the stolen items.
So I've decided to continue this March theme of shakeups and shakedowns. I
just purchased a Fuji GA645 as my first foray into medium format, and will
be selling ALL of my Oly gear, save a couple lenses and two OM bodies
(TBD). My Zuikoholism got way out of hand over the past few months, and I'm
realizing more and more that there are really only a specific few focal
lengths that I'm comfortable with. Whatever money I make off that venture
will almost certainly go back into some film gear (probably a Contax G2
outfit) and more film as I am going to continue shooting film for the
foreseeable future. You see, when our house was robbed, my wife's laptop
was stolen, along with almost all of my digital photos that were on it;
however, all of my prints and film negs and slides were untouched! While I
probably won't bother with rescanning, at least I still have the negs/slides
if I want to go back and print.
For all of its idiosyncrasies, film still has some major advantages, one of
which is that crackhead burglars think film and film gear is worthless.
Anyway, I'll let the list know when I have the OM selloff--list members will
get first dibs before the remainder goes on sale across various gear
forums.
As an aside, just today I purchased a pro pack of Portra 400. I can't wait
to see how it does. I've heard it actually does well with underexposure,
unlike most print film, and my experience with the older formula Portras
shows that overexposure results in some pretty bad color shifting way into
the magenta. I'm going to try shooting the first roll at 500 and see what
happens. If it looks good, I'll underexpose at an EI of 640, and see what
that does. If *that* looks good, I will never again buy Fuji 800Z, since I
shoot it at an EI of 640. We'll see!
--
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