The Three-Ring Circus, Or The Wrong Auto-Focus

It is embarrassing to be foolish in my old age. The business of being a sage elder seated upon a mountain is all very well, but I have come to suspect that I am not suited to it. Case in point was this weekend when I stuffed up a photo assignment.

This was not a paying job, thank goodness. It was an annual visit to the Super Model Car Sunday in Malaga to take pictures of the little cars. I love 'em and am always in awe of what the other enthusiasts can come up with in the year's interval. I use the pictures to report on my hrhoa.wordpress.com blog. The hall is brightly lit, but with a weird colour temperature so I tend to prefer off-camera flash to illustrate the paint jobs on the cars.

In past years I rigged up a Nikon D300s, 8-200 lens, SB700, and Stroboframe holder and got brilliant results. But I was hauling 3.8 kilograms of rig around all day and I ain't getting any younger*. I planned to lighten the load to 1.9 kilograms this year by combining my new Fuji X-E2, a Rayqual adapter, a Nikon 28-105 lens, and a Fuji Ef 42 flash.

The old nikon is an AF-D lens with an aperture ring. The Rayqual adapter also has an aperture ring as it can be used with G lenses. As it does not autofocus or auto aperture on the adapter, that was all to be done by hand. The problem with this was that there are 4 rings of doubt there and only a limited number of hands and fingers to actuate them. And the final criteria for the focussing was to be one old right eye.

That eye used to get me into trouble when I was looking through a Nikon F3 film camera -  some of the dance shows I covered with that film system showed bad focussing near the end. The shift to AF was a blessing. Note: My days of potting sepoys with a three-band Enfield are long behind me, but even then I noted that there was less accommodation to the eyesight as I got older. A formed body of mutineers in red was easy to hit but individuals sometimes escaped.

Well, to cut a long story long, about 3/4 of the images from yesterday show me that I was off with my focussing. The colours are gorgeous, and the flash exposure all i could want.
Setting the Fuji to the Astia film simulation mode with a dynamic range of 200% is perfect for bright toys  - but in this case unfortunately it turned out to be fuzzy toys...

I live and learn. I shall buy a 60mm f:2.4 Fujinon macro lens for the camera and be done with it. Shop tests prove to me that it really can do what I should have been doing yesterday.

* Better looking, yes - but not younger.