Bun

Having the house thoroughly cleaned is a deep joy for us but a nightmare for Trinket for whom the vacuum is a combination of the devil, Godzilla, and Voldemort. She’s fled the house for most of the day.

My lenses arrived. Literally the best customer service I’ve ever experienced. They suggested I cancel my initial purchase to take advantage of their sale that was coming up in a few days. When Aliexpress wasn’t cooperating on giving the promised free shipping they gave me a discount for another portal to the value of the sale - and then stayed in touch via whatsapp through Fedex’s idiocy until I had the lenses. @ttartisanofficial is a company that can be proud of its customer service and it speaks well of Chinese customer service in general. ...

The world has been too long deprived of Trinket! … or Bun as she’s known around here. I recently saw that a Youtuber I enjoy calls their cat, “Pigbunny,” which is a perfect cat name. My camera seems to be working fine with a different memory card. I’d already decided if it packed up, I’d just get another ‘obsolete’ model like it. This sensor apparently has quite the reputation for getting analogue-looking results. I’ve ordered a pair of native TTartisans lenses for it - a 50mm f1.2 and a 17mm f1.4 (cheap as chips at <US$200 for the pair despite very good reviews - which I think will be a super-versatile pair. It makes photography difficult - manual focus lenses shooting at fast apertures with very little depth-of-field to nail the focus. But it’s exactly like the film camera I’ve used for so many years. And when I do get a sharp picture at f1.4 and 1/60th it makes me very pleased. It’s a big chunk of the experience of shooting film without the cost… or the tedious scanning.

And now it’s a series. Trinket is enjoying the plushness of the winter duvet for her daytime snooze. I’m using all manual everything here. I don’t say that as a brag, but to reflect on how easy it is with a ‘modern’ mirrorless camera. There are a couple of new developments that excite me in this regard. The one is the massive viewfinder resolution and magnification of Sony’s latest camera. Over 2000 pixels across and 90% magnification. That’s like the best of both worlds. The what-you-see-is-what-you-get of mirrorless with all the fine visible detail of an optical viewfinder, plus the large size via the magnification of the best old film SLRs. That will make manual focusing even easier on mirrorless cameras. And then I’ve found out a Chinese company that’s made a knockoff of Leica’s 50mm f0.95 Nocton lens. The Leica costs $13,000 (no that’s not a typo). The TTartisans 50mm f0.95 costs $750 (that’s not a typo either) and seems to have better centre sharpness in tests than the Leica. Since Leica mount to mirrorless camera adaptors are tiny, it’d make the perfect portrait lens for a Fuji camera. But that gold-leaf thin depth of field at f0.95 would really be helped by a large, high-res viewfinder to aid focusing. Great times for users of dedicated cameras even as people are writing hot-takes about their death.

Not a single pic posted in July. Well, I’ve not gone more than a handful of kilometres from home. I’ll probably be one of those people with no pictures of this time that anyone in the future could recognise as being from the pandemic. But then I suppose there’ll be no shortage of pics of empty streets and masked faces. I’ll be pleased to look back at a picture of Trinket spotted through the kitchen window getting up to sneaky shenanigans.

Trinket is being pretty conventional this summer - taking her 19 hrs a day mostly in bed.

Trinket is also a big fan of the balcony in spring.

Bun in repose

A different kitter. Trinket has a new game of trying to catch her tail under the banister.