photography

The weather today was a bit patchy, but I took the camera out to get a bit more used to what it can do. As an experiment - and a bit of a reaction against the rate at which I've been acquiring/building lenses! - I only took one lens with me, the Olympus 35mm (70mm equiv.) macro lens, a true macro which continuously focuses from infinity to very close-up indeed. The 35mm is a bit longer than would be ideal for general town photography and it is not the fastest lens in the world, with the largest aperture being f3.5: it is also manual-focus only. In short, not the ideal lens for snapshots! I did, however, end up taking almost 200 photographs, of which about 30 are interesting enough to post to Flickr.

The best thing about this lens is the macro. When it is set up properly and in ideal conditions (the wind not blowing the thing being photographed!), it produces some incredible images:







Though it is super-sharp at all ranges.
There was a hideous "orange walk" in town today, to which I stepped boldly and took photographs. It was quite liberating to assert my right to be there instead of skulking away and avoiding them, changing my plans to accommodate their sectarian bullying. I also got some very disturbing shots:











The first of these pictures was especially upsetting as the little boy at the back got slapped on the back of the head by the adult who was with him for not paying attention to what was going on. These children are not only being slapped about the head, but they are being indoctrinated in a system of hatred. For anyone not familiar with this "event", those uniforms signify nothing, mean nothing: they are not millitary, not police, not even as official as a security guards. They are something made up, an invented fantasy.

This lens was particularly good for this set as it let me take pictures candidly without being too close to the subjects to worry them.

Of course, there was the usual nonsense I like to photograph too: