That is much better than a collection of vacuum tubes ! The first one is lovely.

There is some terrible language in these posts!

I learned this at the Berlin aquarium where there is a large, shallow pool right in the foyer, designed specifically to allow access to the fish - or is that the other way round - to allow the fish access to you? They can't get enough of it. I transferred the experience to the Botanical Gardens in Birmingham and their Koi Carp came flocking to my fingers!

So, If you are in Brum, visit the Botanical Gardens. If you are in Berlin, the aquarium is a fantastic experience that is hard to describe.

With such brilliant lighting the exposure for these wasn't easy (OK, so the camera did it but you still had to choose). 2 and 7 are good examples. What I particularly like are your flowing water scenes - that is exactly what they are, rather than the condensed milkiness so horribly favoured these days!

You surely should. In this present case, get the subject four or five feet away with some bright highlights glinting off (say) holly leaves or the gaps between leaves about a hundred or so feet distant where a wide open lens can't resolve them. You can do it at night too with a relatively close subject and a traffic light controlled junction in the distance - anything to achieve closeness of subject against a distant dark background with bright spots in it.

I simply haven't got the bottle to do this - you have and the results are amazing.

If you can get to the waters edge safely, they love being tickled and you will be mobbed by dozens of them.

I agree with Flan. It really does pull the foreground towards you in a rather alarming way.

I said I would re-photograph the toadstools with a Trioplan. A few days later they were still present although I couldn't get quite same point of view. These were taken with a 1932 Meyer Optik Trioplan 105mm lens remounted to an M42 fit on a K1.

It's a much softer rendering than the drama of the original DA* 300mm version.



This one is an experiment of stacking three images with EV -1.3, -1 and -0,7. The result was a lot more than any of the three images alone.



And finally, the general scene, to provide a lot more context than in the other pictures.



It depends on whether one likes 'bubble bokeh' but personally, I go out of my way to acquire it and, as can be seen, you can get it in various forms from both vintage and modern lenses. Some consider it a fault in the design of the lens.
Long live faulty optics!

spider web.