Denied!

Finally got hold of my father-in-law's lenses, he's got some good glass (see I'm already using the lingo, just like a proper photographer) unfortunately though Minolta must have changed their lens fitting some time between 1970 and now (OK, that's a little unfair I don't actually know how old the lenses are) and they wouldn't fit on to my camera. It's a real shame as he's got pretty much every lens I was planning to get (a wide angle, a macro, a wide aperture telephoto and a teleconverter) and it could have saved me a fortune - a decent example of any one of those lenses would cost more than my camera, some of them about ten times more!

It did however give me an appreciation of just how massively complicated and difficult "serious" photography was back in the pre-digital era. There are so many dials on some of those lenses to set aperture and focus (a digital camera can set these for you based on exposure sensors), plus filters to get the right white balance depending on how the colour temperature the film is optimised for (ditto), plus matching the ISO of the film (again, ditto) and after all that you couldn't actually see if the picture was properly exposed or in focus until weeks later, by which time of course you weren't going to be able to take another if it wasn't. It's amazing anybody ever managed to take any photos worth keeping at all.

Although according to the lovely Hayley, Bob hardly ever did...