July…

Well, these monthly updates seem to be getting later and later, but I am still plugging away at this photo-a-day project. However, there was a little fly in the ointment this month.

Towards the end of July, my camera took an unfortunate dunk in the river and hasn’t quite been the same since.

Same old, same old

One thing about doing one of these projects at a time when people aren’t doing their normal things is that you end up going around and around in circles. To be honest, I’ve probably mentioned this already in previous updates, but such is the circular nature of life in the early 2020s, everything feels like it has been done before.

Fortunately, now that I’m double-jabbed I have braved some new-yet-old places that I’d not visited for a while. I took a trip to town on a couple of occasions and grabbed some shots of Castle Arcade.

Whilst much of the world has been on fire this month, here in South Wales we’ve been having a mixture of scorching heat and torrential downpours. As a youngster I used to like the really hot weather, but middle-aged me is far more partial to the rain.

The heat has been stifling, but the rain has been overwhelming the gutters and bouncing off the pavements. Still, I’d take that over what has been going on in much of southern Europe and the USA lately.

New lens…

This month I treated myself to yet another 50mm prime. To be honest, this is starting to get a little absurd, as I now have three, although one is a Jupiter 8 from the 1960s.

I’m using a Nikon Z6 at the moment, but I’ve been using it with an f-mount lens and the F-to-Z adaptor. I thought I’d dispense with the adaptor and get a Z-mount 50 instead.

The new lens is optically a step above the old AF-S model, but is also better weather-sealed. This is fortunate, because I would end up dunking both the camera and the new lens in the river at the end of July. This was not my finest hour.

The lens is fine, fortunately. No water made it into the lens, onto the sensor, battery compartment or card slot, but the screen on the back is completely dead. The whole thing is on its way to Nikon for repair.

In the meantime, I’ve managed to get a second Z6 for a bargain price, so I’ll use that whilst the other one is being repaired.

Here’s hoping August is a little less eventful…