a reflection on the past

 Back in 2013 I wrote this post when testing a few lenses (old and new) on camera systems old and new. There I pondered the following:

So compared with keeping 35mm neg and micro4/3 (NB going to the Sony A7) I would

• rationalize bodies and lenses (being able to use the 35mm lenses on both systems)
• but still need to carry a 35mm film body for high contrast work

and still need to spend a bundle on the A7 (and more or less be only getting a small advantage?).

These words came back to me in recently taking this photograph with my A7 and the Samyang 35mmf2.8 lens:

I took this with my A7 (bought about 2 years back now) which at once shows the beautiful contrast capacity of modern (and well priced) optics and the still difficult limitations for those of us who like to shoot into the sun. 

Difficult because instead of seeing the sun in the sky we see  only a blown out nuclear blast effect where the sun is to our eyes. I'm reminded of this with these photographs which clearly show the disc of the sun without blowout around them:

and

Of course I moved to the A7 because:

• increasingly colour film development was becoming vexed
• my excellent Nikon film scanner used a comms technology which was becoming obsolete (and required me to keep ancient hardware going to keep it going (or VMWare))
• moving around required me to risk getting that system damaged (its pretty sensitive gear after all, with precision moving parts)

So I've had to "join the future" and give up what I once had, pretty much we all have.