Kurt Johnson

Today we had fantastic weather for walking around and taking a few photos:

 
Boathouses on the Schuylkill river

Crane detail

Looking back at city hall from the "Rocky steps" (in front of the Art Museum)

The art museum

Looking back at city hall.  The Comcast tower is under construction but they're up to about 50 floors so you can see the cranes behind the top of the Bell tower.

Monument with scenic background of power lines and Wawa billboard.

Skyline detail. Our apartment is one of the highrises lost in the middle.

Walking home last night I stopped to take this picure of the Comcast Tower (under construction, with cranes) and the Bell Tower….

..and dropped my 50mm/1.8 lens onto the pavement trying to change lenses one handed in the rain.  The lens glass is fine but the focusing gears grind now, making it pretty worthless for normal use.   However it's possible to use it as a fixed-focus macro lens by flipping the lens around so that the objective element faces the sensor.

 All I did is cut a hole through the lens cap and another hole through the body cap (which I've never used anyway) and superglue them together.  The result:

Since Canon EF lenses set the aperture using an electronic signal from the body, if you want to shoot stopped down you have to put the lens on the body, set the aperture, hit the DOF Preview button, and then remove the lens while holding DOF Preview.  Since DOF is so shallow at macro distances shooting wide open is pretty difficult.  

Here's a shot of a quarter with my "new" lens at f/4.5.

Above is the full frame, below is a 100% crop of the wheels on the right hand side.  It's a little blurry as I should have used a faster shutter speeed (or, heaven forbid, a tripod).

Following my earlier posts on malaria a friend recommended The Coming Plauge, a pretty good read so far. One provocative paragraph:

In West Africa, yellow fever was so ubiquitous that most surviving adults were immune to the disease. Many historians have noted that [British and French colonialists’] acute vulnerability to yellow fever prevented them from attaining full control over West Africa. So obvious was this deterrence in some areas of Africa that it was celebrated in song and verse by people from the Sudan to Senegal. Well into the 1980s schoolchildren in Ibo areas of Nigeria still sang the praises of mosquitoes and the diseases they gave to French and British colonialists.