Jan Erik Moström

GAS is real

GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) is real, and I’m a sufferer. But I’m trying to keep it in check, and I decided earlier this year that I shouldn’t buy any new gear in 2023. About two years ago, I sold my all my Nikon gear that used the F-mount (a D4s with a few lenses – I used to do a lot of sports photography). I used the money to buy a second hand Nikon Z7 with a lens.

Anyway, "after" Covid, I got asked to do some sports photography again. From my previous experience, I knew that I needed a 24-70/2.8 + 70-200/2.8 … but there were no third-party lenses and there was no way I could afford the versions Nikon sells. But after some investigations I found the 28-75/2.8 which was reasonably priced, so I bought that one. However, I couldn’t find any alternative, so I decided to buy the FTZ II adapter and a second hand F-mount 70-200/2.8.

While this combination has worked, in some sense, during the last year, there have been several times that I have wanted to throw away the lens. Last weekend really made me angry. What happened was that:

The lens stopped focusing, it didn’t focus at all. It didn’t just miss the focus, it completely stopped focusing.
The lens locked up the Z7 and I had to restart it.
It started to hunt for focus, preventing me from taking the photos I needed to take.

All in all, the lens acted up perhaps 50 times during a 90-minute photo shoot, resulting in me missing numerous shots that, I think, could have resulted in excellent photos.

With two similar events planned, I started to look at lenses again and found the new 70-180/2.8 which is about half the price of the 70-200/2.8. I then looked at some reviews and while the 70-200/2.8 is better than the 70-180/2.8, the 70-180 is good enough for me. Luckily enough, Nikon has an offer on that lens, among others, that makes it 11% cheaper than normal.

So here I am, the person who said, "no more gear in 2023", waiting for a new lens – sigh. And yes, I’m going to sell the Tamron 70-200 and use the money wisely … I hope.

The world is conspiring against me

This isn’t as much about photography as it’s about post-processing. Some time back, I discovered that Lightroom Classic on my desktop didn’t display all the options that the program has. When I looked closer, I discovered some small text that basically said, "your computer is too old and feeble, so you can’t use the fancy stuff". Yep, my computer isn’t the latest model, not even the previous model … or the one before that … in fact, they are probably right. My computer is a bit old and feeble, however it works quite nicely for anything else than processing images.

To be honest, I get the impression that it spins up the fans if I hold up a memory card from my Nikon Z7 in front of it 😁.

Anyway, yesterday I started to play with ON1 Photo Raw and experienced lagging, we are talking about 1–3 seconds when I try to create a mask using the brush. So, I sent in a support request asking if there was something I could do to improve the performance. The answer was something like "you have an older Intel chip set (hey, at least it isn’t a 68K processor 😁) with not enough graphics memory". They didn’t write it, but between the lines you can read "get a new computer".

My wife has been saying the same thing for quite some time now. It feels like the whole world is conspiring against me 😜.

Taking photos in the dark

I’ve always liked taking photos in the dark, there is something about the contrast between deep black and some coloured lights (natural or artificial). I really love how it can look.

This specific photo was taken while walking across a bridge in Umeå, on the right you see the central parts of Umeå. To the left you see Teg, a neighbourhood south of the river.

Why another site?

Let’s see what I can do with this site, currently my idea is to document my photography and my attempts to getting better at it. In my opinion my biggest problem is that I’m not intentional, instead I’m just reacting to what I’m seeing … I want to be able to plan both my photos and the editing afterwards. Well, we see what happens.