After a week of consistently rubbish weather, today offered some sunny skies and I popped out to try our new wide angle lens, acquired a week ago but not yet used.

For a four thirds camera there is a choice of the Panasonic 7-14mm or the Olympus 9-18mm. The Panasonic is meant to be slightly better for image quality, but it is bigger, heavier and 50% more expensive. So we got the Olympus.

Off to a nearby temple and tried some wide angle shots. The results looked acceptable.

The more pedantic among you (g******j), will be quick to point out that there has been no post entitled “It’s all Ray’s fault - Part 1”. In fact, there has been, it was just not made obvious.

About a week ago I announced my intention to sell my Canon camera gear. I noted that “At some point in the last couple of days I finally decided that sitting on a pile of expensive Canon gear to support the occasional job or sporting shoot was just silly”. This was true, but I did not enlarge upon what pushed me into making the decision.

In truth I had been procrastinating for months about selling my DSLR equipment. I would wake up of a morning with a firm decision to dispose; but by lunchtime had decided I would keep it for ever. By late afternoon I was re-drafting eBay adverts and by bedtime they were deleted and I would go and give the nearest lens a little stroke of affection. I couldn’t decide, and so the default was to do nothing.

The tipping point came in the fresh fruit section of Central food hall on a Saturday afternoon. She who must be obeyed was whizzing about buying stuff to eat and I was feeling as bored as I always do in food halls. Then the phone rang and it was Ray.

I ran into Ray on a photography forum and we have struck up a friendship. We have never met, but we both have a Mac and we both have a GF1 camera and we both live in the same country; which in some cultures is sufficient basis for a marriage. Before retirement, Ray was a professional photographer and for many years he covered the Formula 1 championship; which gives him something of a hero status in my eyes. He is a very enthusiastic and helpful chap and I always enjoy our conversations; especially those which take place in food halls and relieve me from the tedium of having to try and direct my wife to the check-out without passing any of the expensive cosmetic counters.

I can’t remember the purpose of this particular phone call; but we moved onto the topic of using “legacy” lenses on the GF1 and it was downhill from there.

If you buy a micro four thirds format such as the Panasonic GF1 (and you really should), then you have the choice of a reasonable range of lenses from either Panasonic or Olympus; and one from Leica. But that is just the tip of the lens iceberg. The size of the camera means that it is just crying out to accommodate the huge range of lenses from rangefinder cameras such as Contax, Leica and Nikon. The market was quick to respond and soon you could buy adapters which enabled you to attach almost any lens to a micro four thirds camera.

As a photographer of many years, Ray already had some classic lenses which he had used with his rangefinder cameras, and had since invested in more to use with his GF1. And they are investments. A few years ago you could only use these lens with a beat-up old film camera; but once you could stick them on the front of a modern digital camera, prices rose steeply.

So Ray was on the phone telling me how great these lenses were, and I was thinking “I want one”, as well as “she who must be obeyed is getting dangerously close the face cream section”.

And that (the lens desire, not the face cream) is what prompted the sale of the Canon gear. Sell the Canon lenses and use some of the money to get my hands on a classic. And they don’t come any more classic than the Contax 45mm F2 Planar, for years evaluated as the highest quality lens in the world for a 35mm camera, and even now only bettered by a $5,000 Canon monster.

So I found one on eBay and I bought it, for the grand sum of $350, which was a whole lot less than I had received for just one of my Canon lenses. And I got an adapter thingie; and they both arrived yesterday. Here they are attached to my GF1, rather hastily snapped with my phone, for which apologies:

It’s the time of year when there is not a lot on the TV. Not Thai TV of course, there is nothing on any of the fifty or so channels that is worth even a passing glance; ever. But American TV offers many series that we enjoy watching. But it is the summer in America and people go out to enjoy the sunshine and protest about cultural centres being built on the site of a carpet warehouse, rather than staying indoors and watching TV, so the current offerings are rather slim. Only next month will we be able to enjoy the likes of Dexter, House and my personal guilty pleasure, Desperate Housewives.

Yesterday’s mention of the media generated shit storm that erupts with every new offering of Grand Theft Auto turned out to be prescient. Not long after the shock and horror of the “kill all the people at the airport, especially those getting in your way with a luggage trolley” scandal; now we have a new episode of Modern Warfare 2 which is upsetting some people who really should have better things to do with their time.

One of these people is blubber-faced Liam Fox, the UK Secretary of State forWar Defence

Hello! I’m back!

Did you miss me? Thought not. This has been probably the longest break in the glorious history of Pattaya Days and nobody gives a shit, least of all me. Because I have just spent a few days in America.

Very nice it was too. Spent most of my time in the open plains in the area that used to be the wild west. Stunning scenery, amazing sunrises and sunsets, and populated with interesting characters. Also had a chance to pop down to Mexico for a while.

I left school at seventeen and my first pay packet was around twelve pounds for a month of slave labour. Having bought my lunches, paid for my bus fare, and given my mother not a lot, there was little left for the simple pleasures of life. So it was rather surprising that I managed to save up enough for an SLR camera in three months. Mind you, it was a Russian-made Zenit-E which probably had “cheap and nasty” printed on the base in Russian.

After a while, the Zenit made way for a Canon, and a Canon was to be my camera of choice for the next hundred years or so, and I arrived at a Canon 300. Then came digital and I moved to a 300D, then a 30D, then (because there was no 3D) a 1D. The 1D was to support a small but quite lucrative photography business, and appropriate lenses were also acquired, culminating in the monstrously gorgeous 300mm.

Today it is Thailand’s turn for mother’s day; which means the restaurants will be full of fawning families this evening and best avoided. I no longer have a mother, as her liver succumbed to many years of alcohol abuse when I was a young man. At the time of her passing I recall that my overriding emotion was one of relief. So, if you have a Mum and she isn’t currently pissed; give her a big hug.

It looked like it was going to be a dramatic sunset; so we went on the beach for some sunset shots of mothers; but although there were mothers, there was no dramatic sunset. Still, throw a couple of shots at Topaz Adjust and some drama can be added.

Mother and daughter:

Somewhere in a field in deepest Germany, someone took this photo: