Fujifilm

Portrait of a handsome chap.

#throwbackthursday One of the many other gorgeous buildings at the Taj Mahal complex built by Shah Jehan in the city of Agra. Northern spring, 2005.

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.

Sekrit boi. June gets surprisingly cold in winter in Cape Town because our houses aren’t heated. So though it’s not cold in the big sense, your house becomes really damn cold. But this boi knows how to deal with it.

Eid Mubarak. While I’m not a big fan of religions in general, I do have a huge fondness for Islamic architecture. So I thought this might be a good day for this. I’ve seen some of the most beautiful mosques in the world - from the ‘Blue’ mosque in Istanbul, to the jaw-dropping Jama Masjid in Old Delhi designed by Shah Jahaan of Taj Mahal fame. I adore our strange early Cape Town mosques. But I think my favourite of all time might be this humble mosque in the centre of Chefchaouen, Morocco. Sitting lunching in that sunny square in that beautiful town in the Rif mountains, this typical Moroccan mosque with its geometric minarette watched over @furiousgreencloud and I as I recovered my sanity there for ten wonderful days in 1999. African, Maghrebbi skies provide the perfect backdrop. Hoping my Muslim friends feast to bursting point after a fast in the most difficult conditions.

My handsome boi is good company with morning coffee… and any other time.

@withoutaleaf’s baking triumph. Three days and about 300kgs of butter. By the time we emerge, many of us will have developed a host of refined skills that will probably all be useless in the cannibal wasteland that will follow. We should really be practising barbecuing human hearts and syphoning deisel from speeding trucks while shooting lever-action shotguns with our free hand. Ah well, I was never going to achieve the rank of warlord. More likely I’d be food, second-class.

Trinket is the agile one. So using the balcony railing as her runway doesn’t bother us. Skitten on the other hand - who’s twice been witnessed trying to jump onto a coffee table and failing - makes us fret every time. I took a run Friday when the maximum lockdown restrictions ended. But I need to rethink. The government’s curious decision to only allow exercise between 6 and 9 AM meant that my run by the river was like Oxford Street on a Saturday morning. Most people were wearing masks, but the social distancing is near impossible. . In general our government has given a very mixed performance during the pandemic so far. They locked down early and hard - which is good. But they’ve failed to provide adequately for the massive food insecurity, tolerated extraordinary levels of police brutality (including multiple murders of civlians), and made decisions on lockdown policies that lack any evidence base. It feels, as usual, like the conflict between the essentially competent (if unimaginative) faction of the president and his allies vs. the remaining kleptocrats from Jacob Zuma’s economic strip-mining regime - including the police minister, Bekhi Cele.

That time @withoutaleaf decided to make samoosas for dinner. That’s all we had. A freakin’ pile of homemade samoosas. Because we’re grownups and we can do whatever the hell we like. It was pretty great. There was tamarind sauce. I miss those samoosas.