journal features

new lens

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Tokyo, 2007.09.02

Mari and I went for a check-up at the clinic again (they seem to be slated for every three or four weeks). And on the way back I dragged my wife into a small shop that by now she knows all too well. I didn't walk out empty handed.

Yes, just when Mari thought it was all over, I bought a new lens. It's a 50mm "normal" ratio lens, nothing particularly sexy. But at ?6000, it was close to the price I got for selling a lens to the store where I came across it.

Both of these were shot with the aperture at around f/5.6.

Hee hee! I like it.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)