Underwater Camera

"Nikon AW" Cedar Park, 2016
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/5, 1/7 sec, ISO3200
“Nikon AW” Cedar Park, 2016

こんばんは!Good evening!

Today’s photo is of a 1986 Nikon AW (All-weather) film camera which we have used for underwater photos a long time ago. I believe my wife got this camera back in the mid-’90s (before we met) but the history of it is still kind of murky since she doesn’t even remember buying it. It could have been a previous boyfriend’s camera… who knows?

At any rate, I thought it was a cool camera, so I kind of adopted it. 😊 It’s ugly and chunky and heavy, but it has a mutant rangefinder aesthetic which I find oddly attractive. It also feels great to hold, and when you carry it by the hand-strap, its weight makes you feel like you are carrying a deadly weapon. How’s that for personal safety!? 😆

Unfortunately, when I ran a roll of film through it a few years ago, none of the pictures were exposed correctly. I’m not sure if the motor is messed up, but I was so disappointed when I received the negatives, that I put the camera away for good. Plus, I had a new digital waterproof camera, so that pretty much marked the end of the Nikon. 📷

Maybe someday I’ll see if I can troubleshoot what is wrong with it, but I have so many other cameras, I honestly think the chances of that happening are close to zero.

But, it did have a great life, and we used it on a few vacations. If I didn’t have that camera, we would have missed many shots. Here are a couple of the photos from snorkeling in the Bahamas way back in the year 2000. Ancient history!

"Double Peace" Bahamas, 2000
“Double Peace” Bahamas, 2000
"Freedive" Bahamas, 2000
“Freedive” Bahamas, 2000

Have a great rest of the evening or day!

おやすみなさい!

– B Barron Fujimoto

Cutie

"Cute Fish" Cedar Park, 2016
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/7.1, 1/40 sec, ISO3200
“Cute Fish” Cedar Park, 2016

こんばんは!Hello!

Here in Austin, we’re experiencing a lot of rain. 🌧 So today’s photo is of a little guy (or gal maybe?) who is right at home in the wet stuff. Literally. Its home is water.

It’s one of my new fish, an Albino Barb. It look just like my Tiger Barbs except instead of black stripes, it has white stripes. It’s so cute, isn’t it? 🐠

By the way, it’s so difficult to get a close-up photo of the aquarium fish. I set the camera to manual focus, pre-focused about 6-inches away, bumped up the ISO to 12,800, put the camera on burst mode and waited… and waited. When a fish came into the frame, I pressed the shutter and let it capture a dozen or so frames. 📸 And I still didn’t get a really good photo. Oh well, it was still fun!

When I imported into Lightroom, I had about 340 photos. From those, I rejected using the X key. If you hold down the Shift key while pressing X and you will reject the photo and move to the next one automatically. Makes it quick to mark photos for deletion. After setting the reject flag, just Delete Rejected Photos and say bye-bye to all those unwanted photos. After doing that, I was left with about 8 photos of the three types of fish I have, the two types of Barbs, and the Siamese algae eaters.

I find it so fun to delete photos… weird huh? But hoarding photos and things that are not useful or beneficial is so unattractive to me. Ugh the clutter!

I hope you had a nice Monday. Stay dry! ☔

おやすみなさい!

– B Barron Fujimoto

 

 

Library Visit

"At the Library" Cedar Park, 2016
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/4, 1/60 sec, ISO1000
“At the Library” Cedar Park, 2016

こんばんは!

Today Koa and I went to the library to pick up some more books since he blazed through 5 paperbacks of One Piece manga. I also returned a book that I started reading, but was not really into anymore. That book, “Cursor’s Fury” is the third in a series of a fantasy epic. I thought the first two were really good, but for some reason, I just didn’t feel like continuing the series at this time. I’ll probably pick it up again at some point in the future, but for now I felt like I wanted something new.

I was just browsing the fiction section and I came across “Panic in a Suitcase” by Yelena Akhtiorskaya. It sounded interesting… the story of a family of Russian immigrants to the United states. We’ll see!

One thing that has changed about me as I get older is that now I don’t worry about not finishing books. When I was younger I’d feel an obligation to soldier on through a book that I wasn’t even enjoying all the way to the end. I’m not sure exactly why. But now I feel like it’s not such a big deal to not finish a book… who cares anyways? Life’s too short to spend time on things that aren’t fulfilling or enriching. You have to just let things go, right?

Anyways, that’s my thought these days.

I hope you had a nice weekend, and let’s have a great Monday!

おやすみなさい!

– B Barron Fujimoto