Photographs

Samir is cleaning his Canon G9 camera. It's a few years out of warranty and always comes back from vacations to India with dust specks. Far too annoying a problem to ignore, far to small a problem to pay a fair deal of money to get repaired professionally any more.

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I recently acquired a new old lens, a Pentax SFX-era F1.4 50mm autofocus from the 1980s. While it is a lens ideally suited for night photography, I recently had the chance to give it a whirl while out and about. Here are a few of the good photos I got.

The Index is one of my favourite buildings to look at in Dubai, and not only because a friend of mine lives there. This Foster & Partners building is perfect for the Dubai landscape, with its pleasingly retro angles and box grater shape, its use of textured materials. And yet it's completely different to the chrome and glass towers that make up most of the city's skyscrapers. Chief among them is the Burj Khalifa, tallest building in the world, of-late Tom Cruise's personal dangling venue of choice. I'm fairly indifferent to its design, though I guess it could have been a lot worse.

Despite the modern image of the Emirates being a glass & chrome metropolis, drive a little out of the city and you'll end up on a road that looks very much like this, no matter where you go...

...and once you get bored and decide to return to the cities, chances are you'll end up in a traffic jam that looks very much like this, no matter where you go!

It's a small concession that once every couple of years, when you do get stuck in a traffic jam you at least get to see some aerobatics. (Also, I really, really need to clean all the dust spots from my camera sensor.)

The lens, by the way, performs admirably, even shooting straight into the setting sun. You can't see it at this size and treatment, but I can read the number plates on most of the traffic in this shot.

These last two shots further demonstrate how marvelous this lens has turned out to be. Both of them are shot through a very dirty window, with harsh corridor lights behind and above me casting all manner of reflections on the glass. The second one, in fact, was taken at a sharp glancing angle to the glass. It's a wonder I managed to get anything at all!

Needless to say, I'm only scratching the surface of what this lens can do, and future experiments will follow.

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I am a lazy cook. No other way to say it. I have no patience for slowly stirred sauces, carefully watched pots, or preparations that need fifteen different components plated at the last minute. If it all sits together in a bowl and I can eat it with one utensil, then so much the better.

I am also a stubborn cook. Stir fries have often tantalised me, and every time I try my hand at one I learn a little more, make it a little better. I'm at the stage now where I can't quite bang out a hundred plates of noodles that all look and taste the same, but the outcome is generally tasty, and even when my own pantry conspires to throw me a curveball, I can generally deal with it.

Last year when I went to India I enlisted the aid of a cousin who was coming in from the States to bring me a bunch of photo equipment -- most of which I subsequently never used, except for the M42 mount adapter ring that allowed me to use my old 58mm manual F2 Zenit lens on my Pentax K200D digital SLR.

Because the Zenit has sat on my camera for the past six months (I love it!), I have not really given much thought to using the other lens I got, a 500mm mirror lens. Mirror lenses are odd beasts, behaving like reflector telescopes rather than straightforward lenses. The upshot is they're a shorter size for more zoom, and give you odd donut shaped bokeh.

At some point after I returned from India I thought I'd just set the camera to B&W (cyan pass, JPEG) and shoot an entire card. What's the use of a digital camera if you can't just practice for a while?

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