A world wide web of LIES

(That’s me.)

So. I have this friend, and she has this Pentax DSLR. She also has all these sweet lenses from her old film camera, but couldn’t get the digital camera to accept them. A couple weeks ago I put one of them on (the vintage 50mm that took the following pics), and this time the camera said, “yes sir, how may I help you?”

I told it to take some sweet pics, and also to have a hella trippy depth-of-field on the ones I take from a distance.

The camera said, “OK, but everything else is going to be manual.” *

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Today, through the magic of inter-net and reading manuals and randomly mashing buttons, we managed to get her camera to accept all the other lenses, including this enormous beauty.

HUGE ups to Pentax for never changing their lens mount. (It’s ok that Canon changed theirs back in the 80s, since I’m starting from scratch anyway.)

*Much later (today) I realized I could have just switched it to aperture priority instead of being a klutz on full manual.

List of legendary creatures from Japan

The best part is how specific some of these creatures are. My favorites, in list form (of course):

• Kappa—a famous water monster with a water-filled head and a love of cucumbers
• Kurage-no-hinotama—a jellyfish which floats through the air as a fireball
• Makura-gaeshi—the pillow-moving spirit (this one seems to like to torment me nightly!)
• Tankororin—an unharvested persimmon which becomes a monster
• Tōfu-kozō—a spirit child carrying a block of tofu
• Uma-no-ashi—a horse’s leg which dangles from a tree and kicks passersby (I want to come back as one of these!)

This is for my pal Bill (who doesn’t even read this mess)

He played a concert in the brand new library’s brand new cafe area, as part of the grand opening celebrations. I took pictures of this, for his and the library’s benefit. At the time he joked that it would be funny to take a pic of the big LIBRARY sign on the corner, and photoshoop it to be spelled wrong, and see if the staff would be alarmed. I am too lazy for that level of shooping, so I did a joiner, since those are easier to eff with. (And even that took me five months to do!)