I had a pretty long pause with photography, since I was in a heat wave that doesn’t really encourage going out with a camera unless you really want to have a heat stroke, and it’s also a tourist season where everything’s crowded and I hate that.

Also, spending karma in industrial quantities is about as much fun as it sounds, so I wasn’t in a mood for anything really. I was processing that shit, trying not to go crazy too much, and eating too much food because I was at home and stressed out.

Recently, I figured out that if I climb the local hill, which is basically the top of the island, the temperatures are manageable even during the summer if I start late enough, and return in the deep dark of the night. Of course, once we get high enough to get out of the heat and the crowd, photographic opportunities start making themselves apparent, and then of course I see that I only have my phone with me, because climbing in hot weather is hard enough carrying my own excess weight, let alone camera gear. 🙂 After several frustrating experiences with iPhone raw files taken during the blue hour, I actually took the Sony A7RV and the FE 35mm f/1.4 GM with me yesterday, and we also stayed out longer than usual which means that the sun set while we were on the top, and we were descending through the blue hour and into complete darkness. So, here’s the album and some individual shots. This is Biljana’s album.

I still can’t believe I got completely sharp 61MP hand-held shots in deep blue hour with stars clearly visible in the shot, and the only thing I felt I was missing was the ability to get ultra wide angle of the Zeiss 16-35mm f/4, but of course the Zeiss at f/4 would run out of light far, far before I took some of the best shots, so I would have to carry the tripod with me as well, and even if I could convince myself that it’s a good idea, fiddling with a tripod in those conditions is really impractical and possibly even dangerous, because you can barely see anything in the conditions where that camera manages to get all those colours. So, I’m considering FE 14mm f/1.8 GM, which I didn’t buy because I thought it overlaps with the Zeiss so much that one would never be used, and its strongest point is astrophotography in the mountains. Well, now that looks like more than just a fringe use case.