The Man at Home: Camera Toys

Ridiculous. Ridiculously awesome that is!

I mentioned in my Art Student post that I bought a manual lens for my big fancy camera. I had so much fun with it that I decided to find out what other lenses I could use. It turns out that with a simple adapter I can use a ton of old manual lenses that hardly anybody wants any more. These are lenses from the 60's and 70's before auto focus became the norm on cameras. The quality of manufacture and the quality of the glass is great and the pictures they are capable of is pretty fantastic. I looked around and did a bit of reading and decided that lenses made for Minolta cameras had the quality that I wanted and a lack of name brand recognition that has kept them fairly cheap. I spent $100 and bought a Minolta MD to micro 4/3 adapter and two lenses, a 50mm f1.7 and a 200mm f4.5. Translated to English, I bought two lenses that zoom things in more than before, the 50mm is a bit closer, the 200mm is trying to be a telescope.

Let me out!

I've been taking a lot of pictures. A lot a lot. I took over 150 pictures yesterday while the kids were swinging. I justify it by saying that I'm learning how to shoot pictures with the manual lens, but the truth is that taking pictures with the manual lens is just fun. It's as much fun to get them wrong and figure out why as to get them right. I think, I'm not sure of course, but I think that when taking pictures is more fun, I'll take a lot more of them. It provides an artistic outlet for me and provides my wife and all the grandparents with the pictures they demand. I don't really need pictures of my kids, I'm around them all the time. Everyone else seems to like them though and I'll probably be posting more of them on the blog as I get better at it. What does any of this have to do with being a stay at home dad? Probably nothing really, except that taking good pictures of my children might help justify my not working. Imagine that I'm scrapbooking, except I'm afraid of scissors so I have to do it on the computer.
I'm also trying something new with this post, I'm trying to add a jump. There should be a "click for more" or something after these words. The idea is that I can give you a synopsis of the story or just a picture or two and if you want to read the rest you can click through and get the whole thing. Anyway, there are more pictures after the jump, if it works.