I had very good luck with the early evening light and the late spring motives lately:
The wideangles are taken with the FE 16-35mm f/4 Zeiss, and the closeups with the FE 50mm f/1.8. Both on A7CR.
Which makes me think. Yesterday, Sony released the new A7RVI camera, the upgraded version of my A7RV, and it left me completely cold. Sure, improvements are always possible and welcome, but considering how I barely convinced myself to upgrade from the decade old A7II, those improvements would have to be something I really care about, and in this case I don’t see much of those. It’s similar to the A1II now; faster readout, more usable electronic shutter, but if I really cared about those features I’d have gotten the A1II. I actually find the A7CR more usable, because it’s smaller and lighter which allows me to take a very compact setup with me when I’m not in the mood for carrying heavy gear, like for instance in two recent walks when I wanted to walk faster and not stop every now and then to take pictures. Also, better gear isn’t always better. I used the 50mm f/1.8 instead of the optically far superior 50mm f/1.2 GM, simply because it’s small and light, the image quality is still very good, and the prospect of carrying the f/1.2 lens for a long fast walk is unappealing, especially since I don’t know if there will be any pictures worth taking. There’s nothing wrong with carrying heavy gear if I know exactly what I’m after, but that’s not always the case. What I want in those cases is something that will be light enough and work well enough for me to catch the light if it does its thing in the vineyards and the poppy fields. Sometimes, the gear is crucial and I need it to be as good as possible. At other times, the gear just needs to be good enough, and the issue is whether the light and the motive will intersect in just the right way.
It’s this way for other things, as well. A car doesn’t have to be the best one possible – just good enough to do what you need it to do. Your mind doesn’t have the be the best in the world, just good enough for what you need to do. Your character doesn’t have to be the purest possible; just pure enough to avoid the traps of Satan and desire God.
I recently had a situation where I had to revise some ideas from my childhood, and I had some new revelations. One would expect me to have been forced to go through those things much earlier, before initiation into vajra, for instance, but obviously not. One doesn’t have to have complete understanding of everything in order to attain initiation. For instance, if you live in a society with primitive natural science, you can believe in impetus and phlogiston and alchemy, and that won’t be a problem for you spiritually. You can believe your uncle to have been a good person while in fact he turned out not to be, and you’ll have to revise your ideas about him, but it exists on a completely different level – that of understanding, rather than purity. For initiation, purity is essential, and understanding is optional. It needs to be good enough not to get in the way. Likewise, my understanding of my childhood didn’t get in the way, but it turned out to be incomplete and flawed. Things I considered to be my own errors turned to be, in tennis terminology, forced ones. That’s the difference between an error that happens when the other player hits the ball particularly well and forces you into a position where an error is expected, rather than fumbling things yourself and losing a point.
In photography, there’s a difference between a photo failing because your composition sucked, the light sucked or you shook the camera, missed focus, miscalculated depth of field or something similar, or failing because the lens had strong and ugly flare when pointed at the sun, or being critically unsharp at a certain aperture, focusing distance and so on. Basically, the light and the motives can suck, a photographer can suck and gear can suck. There’s only so much you can do with gear – at some point, it is no longer a limiting factor for what you’re doing. At that point, upgrading gear is pointless and won’t produce better results. Upgrading your skills, going places that look good in a photo, recognising good light and motives, and composing everything well, that’s what’s far more likely to give you improved results.