Two more pix

Another black-eyed susan. I know I already posted one yesterday, but they grow in wild abundance around my house and give me lots of opportunities to practice macro photography. This one was not edited at all, unlike the one I posted yesterday, which I cropped and adjusted the colors a little to make it brighter and deeper. This one is SOOC (straight out of the camera), with some tiny feeding insect on it.



Here is another of my cameras, a Pentax Spotmatic F, mid-70s era (Pentax stopped making the Spotmatic in 1976, and I think the F model was the last of the variations, or nearly the last).  Of course this one is fully manual with no zoom capability.  I also have an early-90s era Minolta but the Pentax has more character.  When I get roped into taking pictures of some family event, I usually load the Minolta with 100 or 200 ISO film and use it for outdoors, and load the Pentax with 400 ISO for use indoors without a flash.

My wife and I purchased the Minolta when we were first married so we would have a good camera for preserving memories.  The acquisition of the Pentax is more storied.  Back in the early 90s one of my cousin-in-laws was busted for possession of an illegal substance that starts with "m" and of course all his property was confiscated by the state as part of their war on drugs racket.  Everything, that is, except his boat, which was docked at Canyon Lake and was therefore overlooked since he didn't offer any information about it.  This camera was in the boat.  He gave my dad the boat and all its contents in return for bailing him out of jail.  My dad wasn't really interested in learning how to properly use the camera so he turned it over to me (my dad kept the boat).  I was able to gather from reading a book on photography that this camera had a light meter and required a battery for the meter to operate, so I took it to a camera shop that used to be on Gulfdale to find out what battery I needed.  The original battery that this camera used is no longer made because it was made with mercury, and had a kind of odd rating of 1.3 volts, but the guy there had already worked on this model and made a small conversion that allowed it to use a modern 1.5-volt battery of the same physical size, which didn't cost me very much at all.  I was able to download a pdf of the original manual recently, which was nice.

I'll have to ask my wife where all our photos are stashed.  I might be able to find a few that are fit to be scanned and shared.