journal features

farewell to old glass

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Kokubunji, 2024.12.14

Today I sold three of my old Pentax and Minolta manual focus lenses, plus a 30mm macro lens that I'd recently picked up in a trade-in. I hadn't liked the results from the macro lens, and as much as I love the old lenses I find that micro-four-third cameras struggle to get clear images in the viewfinder when using them. Yet again, I was surprised to get more for those old lenses than I expected.

Having recently given The Girl my E-M5 camera, I'm now using the E-M10 that I bought for her in 2020. It's just back from the shop after my ten-year-old 17mm f/1.8 died. The camera has a clean bill of health, so I'll use today's new lens, a manual-focus replacement for the dead one with her camera as my walk-around gear from now on. I've got a cheap 35mm f/1.7 coming for X'mas as a complement to this one.

my walk-around camera/lens combo

It feels good to clean house with the hobby stuff. I've now offloaded my "heavy" jigging gear and the heavy lenses. Moving on...

rand()m quote

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

—John Gardner