New dress! 😃

🧐

A photo I took of some leaves, with absolutely wild background highlights rendered by a modified Tessar with a helicoid. I like how this black-and-white photo ends up looking almost like a chemistry experiment! Lens used: Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 50mm ƒ/2.8

Such funny results. Apparently I’m a Wild Child, but most of the 100 activities on the list I engaged in weren’t even wild. I’m probably somewhere in between Wildly Workaday and Moderately Mettlesome! theinnocencetest.com

It was such a nice day to lie in the garden and look up at the trees. 🙂 (And to take some photos with Van Gogh-style rendering!) Lens used: MC Helios-77M-4 50mm ƒ/1.8

Misha prowling on the bird feeder. He doesn’t look impressed, but that’s just what his face looks like. 🤭 I like the Van Gogh-like rendering of the background highlights! Lens used: MC Helios-77M-4 50mm ƒ/1.8

Eiki prowling in our garden. I’m impressed with this lens! It seems to be sharper than my Helios-44-2; and in my experience, it swirls more readily—or perhaps more obviously due to its larger cat eye bokeh. Lens used: MC Helios-77M-4 50mm ƒ/1.8

Here’s every typeface that I’m currently working on (to some degree or another). Hopeful that they’ll all see the finish line before I start drawing 2 dozen new ones. Which one are you most excited about?

I always have about 100 tabs open in Chrome, so I’m often forced to restart Photoshop to free memory when it reaches 14GB (out of 16GB). I finally upgraded to a Mac Mini M4 Pro with 48GB last weekend, and as it turns out, it takes 20–34GB to sustain my toxic browser behavior. 😆

A photo of a canna lily I took in Niagara-on-the-Lake last August. Lens used: MMZ Helios-44-2 58mm ƒ/2

The two eldest are window watching. And Mowgli is sitting like Buddha. 🤭

I’m totally calling my daughter Va. I hope she will continue the tradition and call her child A, and perhaps one day, I will get a great-grandchild called ‘ ’.

I need to get up and show my wife. 😃

😯 😯

I forgot to share this photo from last July, when I realized my dress and nails perfectly matched the new purse I bought a few days earlier. I always try to coordinate my makeup with what I wear, but it always brings me pleasure when I notice accidental color coordinations like this.

There are so many squirrels in La Fontaine Park in Montréal! I managed to take a cute picture of this little sciurine squire. 🤭 On the left in natural colors, and on the right an edit with more autumn-like colors which arguably makes for a better picture. Lens used: Helios-44-2 58mm ƒ/2

I photographed a Montréal firetruck using a modified lens. It can no longer focus, but it can create some insane bokeh! Lens used: Kalimar MC 28mm ƒ/2.8

Mowgli and I came across this cat who wouldn’t let us pass until we solved a riddle. Problem was, we didn’t know what the riddle was, as neither of us spoke feline—so we turned back. Actually, Mowgli may have understood him, but I don’t speak Mowglorian, so… 🤷‍♀️

Eiki and Misha. Can you tell they love each other?

Complementary cicada color coordination. 🤭

Auto correct on my phone is weird; it almost consistently changes instances where I write ‘him’ into ‘Jim’. Statistically it’s far more likely that I do mean to write ‘him’, isn’t it? Yet auto correct on my phone always goes, “Surely she made a typo now; she must mean Jim!”

One of the most stunning chess clocks is the Tanner, in my opinion. Here is one with the original box, featuring Cheltenham (1896) and De Vinne (1892), so I imagine this one is from the late 1890s to early 1900s.

I’ve never heard of this book before, but I came across the deluxe edition of ‘Critical Role: The Chronicles of Exandria—The Mighty Nein’ on Facebook Marketplace, and I love the cover and sleeve design!

I have so many synthetic flowers, I only just noticed that my wife put a vase with real flowers on my cabinet. 🤭 I don’t know when! But they’re perfect! 💖

This modified Tessar is such a strange lens! It made the light cast onto this house by the setting Sun look like fire! Not that this is the only strange thing about this photo… Lens used: Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 50mm ƒ/2.8 (modified, with a front optic from an unknown lens)

A photo I recently took at the botanical garden my wife and I went to for her birthday. I had so much fun photographing flowers and trees for hours! Here are seed cones of a Dawn Redwood. Lens used: MC Pentacon Electric 50mm ƒ/1.8 (+ 17–31mm helicoid)

I’m burning up and freezing at the same time, and I have a throbbing headache even after having taken two Tylenols. Either I’m violently ill or I’m transforming into a super-autistic! I bet it’s the latter. That’s definitely something I would do. 🤭

I’m looking into knives for self-defence. One knife that looked quite appealing to me was called the Goodboy. But I’m not carrying a Goodboy! If it were called Goodgirl, I would have been sold.

I’m quite pleased with the expressionistic rendering of this photo. It vaguely reminds me of Monet. Lens used: MC Pentacon Electric 50mm ƒ/1.8

I reversed the front element of my Mir-1V, and now it takes photos with interesting spherical distortions and dramatic “exploding bokeh”! The type of spherical distortion—either warping inward or expanding outward—depends on how I focus the lens. Lens used: Mir-1V 37mm ƒ/2.8

Our toy poodle Mowgli is not always nice; his opinions can be strikingly severe and hard to stomach!

Trying out a lens cap with a star cutout, which produces star-shaped bokeh; and to my surprise, it also created this majestic star-shaped flare! I don’t know if I was visited by an angel or Satan. 🤭 Lens used: MC Pentacon Electric 50mm ƒ/1.8

This is SUCH a Japanese invention. I love it! Having looked further into it, apparently the tail was inspired by seahorses, as the first cat and tiger tail prototypes were deemed too light. I’m surprised they didn’t turn to Godzilla for inspiration. 🤭

I took two alien-looking photos last night. Can you believe they’re just macro photos of a brick wall? The bokeh comes from the specular highlights of the little stones inside the bricks. • Lens used: Mir-1V 37mm ƒ/2.8 (with close focus mod + 12mm extension tube)

I received another Soviet lens, the Mir-1V 37mm ƒ/2.8. It was used in the Dune 2 movie as a swirly short focal length companion to the Helios-44-2—my favorite lens! I haven’t taken particularly interesting photos with the Mir-1V yet, but it’s fun how readily it swirls!

I really like the—what I assume to be Slavic-inspired—Roman numerals on these ’70s Russian ‘Slava’ clocks. Slava alarm clocks (Second Moscow Watch Factory, 1970s).

People asking photography gear questions in a beginners photography group are the absolute worst! Scum of the Earth! I’m at least as outraged as he is by this profound affront to all that is sacred.

Wow, such a radical design. It looks like it could be a prop for a retro futuristic movie like Beyond the Black Rainbow. Majak mechanical table clock (USSR, 1970s).

I went outside for my nocturnal walk and heard a lot of noises coming from the large tree at the edge of our garden. I took a picture with the flash on and saw three pairs of eyes staring at me with concern. 🤭

A photo I took of a hibiscus in our garden, and an edit with an antique color rendering. Which do you prefer? Lens used: Helios-44-2 58mm ƒ/2 (MMZ, 1970)

We have been giving Misha banana-flavored medicine. He hates it! Which is weird. We all know how much cats love banana, right? One of these medication producers is either an evil genius or living at the edge of reality. "Shall we go with sardine flavor? Nah—synthetic banana!"

This is wild. I tell this guy he's insulting me instead of addressing the topic at hand, which makes me unfun. Because we all know that the most fun people are those you can bully and they just take it without holding you accountable. Those are the real lives of the party!

Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a super hairy rectangular kite with beady eyes!

This is what my ADHD sounds like, by the way. Except more polyphonic, semi-periodically syncopated, less linear, branching into a multitude of self-similar iterations, and by the end of it, it has morphed into Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill.’ youtu.be/q1bG-FeXtzc?...

Two of our demons showed great teamwork today; I suspect Misha knocked this king of Natalie’s Tal repro down from the cabinet, while Mowgli eagerly chewed on it like a royal bone!

I experimented with placing a heart cutout at the center of a lens—an idea I got from Gregory–Maksutov lenses, which feature a spherical mirror that focuses the light; but it also obstructs some light, resulting in ring-shaped bokeh. And it worked! I got ring highlights with heart-shaped interiors!

Eiki was sleeping next to me last night. ☺️ (Photo taken with a flash; it was actually dark)

A completely unnecessary ligated ‘i’, but together with the descender on the capital ‘G’, it’s the highlight of this book cover for me.

Two nocturnal macro photos I forgot to share. The background highlights in the second photo appear to be right behind the flowers; but in fact, the yellow circles are decorative bar lights, and the blue circle is a green traffic light in the distance! Lens used: MC Pentacon Electric 50mm ƒ/1.8

Warning: Don’t give a perfectionist who owns walls a pot of spackling. They can’t contain themselves!