An overdue update, June 2020

My latest post on this – my unofficial weblog – was from Februari 2019, over a year ago. It would be easy to say that I’ve been busy, it would be easy to say that I had more important things to do – and to be fair, we did buy a house, which did take up a few months of my spare time – but the truth is mostly that I didn’t search for time to spend on writing. That, and the fact that somewhere in the last year, a php-update error transformed this site into a white page with error lines, and technical me didn’t know how to fix it (and couldn’t care enough to ask for help).

I recently did that, and lo and behold, it is working again. Time for a long overdue update.

With the world upside down due to the COVID-19 outbreak, my photography assignments cancelled, our (social) calendar empty, and a new appreciation for ergonomically sound chairs to work in (which we do not have in our home office), I’ve been able to focus more on personal photography work. I’ve also been contemplating a bit where to take my photography in the coming times.  A topic maybe for some other time.

Suffice it to say that we are fine. We’ve moved into a new (larger, thankfully, with this work-at-home situation) house, we’re able to work from home quite a bit, and we’ve had relatively little direct trouble from the epidemic that is raging outside, apart from not going on our planned holiday (northern Italy, not the best destination at this time) and not seeing our parents and friends. We can survive that, surely. 

I’m hoping to add regular posts here in the near future, but in order to not say goodbye without some photographic content, I’m adding some images from a personal project that has helped me through these corona-times. 

We’ve made it a habit to take a daily walk through the small bits of nature close to home, and we regularly hear and (fleetingly) see pheasants. I’ve made it my quest to photograph them with old analog telephoto lenses. Over time you get to know their habits and habitats, and I was able to get some decent exposures these past few weeks. I hope you enjoy these photograhps as much as I’ve enjoyed taking them!

This male pheasant was parading quite some time in front of me. Almost too close for the Leica-R Elmar 180 mm f/4 that I was using this day. I was quite pleased with this images rendering.
Also with the Leica-R 180 mm, this male pheasant was a bit more shy and stayed close, but didn’t show itself and only peaked through the leaves at us.