Black and White Project: Day Twelve

A New Lens, Rory Tyer Band

Living on a university campus in on-campus housing has its positives and negatives. The positives mostly revolved around it being incredibly convenient for me to go to class and to fulfill my responsibilities of the various positions I had on campus. Also, there’s a somewhat built-in community. The community is full of introverted academics, but its a community nonetheless. It did me well for the three years I was there.

When you live in an apartment on campus, it still kind of feels like a dormitory. We didn’t pay utilities, just rent. Even the internet was provided. The carpet is that really thin industrial kind that you’d find in a dorm room or office building. It just takes a lot of work to really make it feel homelike. Not to mention, the furniture we organized our stuff with is what you’d find in a dorm room: plastic containers, drawers, shelves. When we moved to our new place we wanted it to be more like a real home. It is our real home now. But it seems silly to set up plastic drawers from Target as our bedside tables. Makes it still kind of feel like a dorm room.

Furniture is expensive, though. And so after one trip to a store to buy very expensive furniture, I decided it was time to search out Craigslist for some good stuff. I found some great deals on a couple bedside tables, and the people lived right down the street from us. It was great. When you live in the city, Craigslist is a goldmine.

However, in the process I decided to search the words “lens” and “camera” and “Pentax.” That was very dangerous. I found that there were a lot of people selling their old film Pentax cameras. Not many people have use for those anymore. I mean, I don’t. Except for one thing: lenses. All of Pentax’s lenses, stretching back decades still fit their cameras today. Sure the lenses were all manual focus, and not many people like having to deal with that, but they were some quality lenses. So here people are selling these film cameras for dirt cheap and they’re selling all their lenses and equipment with them. The lenses are great quality lenses, and so I decided to contact a couple people offering their cameras and lenses for quite reasonable prices. I made a quick trip up to Evanston to pick up a camera bag with the K1000, three lenses, two flashes, and the bag itself. Met another person at a train stop in Highland Park and got a great 50mm f1.7 lens with the Pentax ME Super.

Manual lenses may be a bit more work, but not that much more. And it’s great. I’m getting some great quality shots from especially the new f1.7 lens. I haven’t really done much with manual lenses in the past, so I decided to just keep it on my camera and practice with it a lot.

Recently my friend Rory Tyer has a band (Rory Tyer Band). They played at show at the Elbo Room in Chicago. It was the semi-finals of a Battle of the Bands that has been going on for a while now. The winner gets to play at the House of Blues in August, I believe. (They won first place at the semi-finals…)

By the way, you should check out Rory’s band. Their newest album is a free download. They’re also on Spotify – “Six Thousand Summers” is their newest album. If you live in the Chicago area, you should go hear them at the Elbo Room’s Battle of the Bands finals on July 27th.

Anyway, I took my camera and my new (old) lens with me to their last show and tried it out. I was happy with my results. Here are a few snapshots from the evening.