The Watch House, Rocky Island, Seaton Sluice

An 1880 volunteer lifeboat watch house, now run as a museum.

The weather here today has been constant mizzle, later turning into full-on rain, but the general trend has been towards the warmer climbs of spring and summer so I thought I’d share this image from August 2020, with its warm vibes.

From memory, this was on a family walk where my wife’s parents had been able to visit for the first time post-lockdown. The weather was glorious and we wandered around the sluice and down to the beach.

I took my Fuji GFX 50R with me, with an adapted Minolta Rokkor 100mm F2.5 lens attached, something I clearly need to do a bit more often as the sharpness and detail through the image here for an adapted old manual full-frame lens is fantastic. The ƒ/2.5 aperture is nice and wide, particularly on the medium format sensor, while the long-ish focal length (around 80mm full-frame equivalent) gives a lovely shallow depth of field that really suits the high key, warm scene I think.

Love of a manual-focus lens

I do love a manual-focus lens and while my photography has stagnated for some time now, I’ve been getting the itch again this week. Fujifilm makes outstanding lenses for their cameras—both X and GFX systems—but the feel of an older manual lens just excites me more to get out and play with taking photos.

I recently spotted my Fuji X-E4 looking a bit neglected in my office and began wondering about whether I should sell it: as I’ve taken fewer images in the past year, it’s rarely been used.

But then swapping some lenses around, I mounted the (not-so-old, but manual focus) Voigtländer 40mm F1.4 on the X-E4 and the combo just looks so cool I want to get out and use it.

Sad or shallow perhaps, and aesthetics of the camera really shouldn’t matter when it comes to making images with it, but I’ve written multiple times before about how I think it does matter. If you look at your camera and think ‘cor, I want to get out and make some images with that’, then half the battle is won. Motivation is one of the biggest blockers in photography, so if a good-looking camera motivates you then great!