With the weather moving in, I’m thinking I’ve got to work on some other activities to occupy my time and mental work besides hiking. I’m going to hike this winter, but I can’t see it being as convenient as it’s been this summer. I can feel it inside, how important it is going to be for me to keep my physical mental therapy active for my own personal growth, healing, and becoming a better person that I was yesterday.
Today, I took my camera around on break at work. There’s some good colors to capture, some interesting trees, and it seems I can not for the life of me find a “good” 28mm wide angle lens to save my life. I’ve had three of them now. The first one was great, but I gave it to a mountain in Idaho someplace. The second I bought to replace my first one gave every image a blurry, highlighted, smear that it is basically unusable as a photographic lens. The one I received in the mail on Saturday looked like a really well made lens, felt great, nice and heavy, large glass on the front, rubber grip for focus, and through the eye piece, it appeared to be wonderful.
In practice however, the images seem to all have a halo, aren’t clear, it really suffered in low light, and very image needed a LOT of contrast adjustment, color, and none of them had any good focus. Needless to say, I’m still shopping for a 28mm (I’d love to find one even wider like a 24mm, 18, 16 etc..). This one is from the 70’s, made in Korea for a company called Coastar (28mm, f/2.8, No. 440222). I can’t complain too much though. The lens cost $7, and shipping was $21.
Here are the images I took with this lens, I tossed out the worst of them, and these aren’t much better.
Close up of the bark, this tree was scraggly 
Bendy branch over the F-16 
Scraggly branches 
I love this half and half tree 
Never noticed these red berries on this bush before 
Trying for clarity 
From in front of my building
