Dec. 7, 2025
I’ve got roughly ten or so lenses in my collection, most are second-hand manual lenses of varying prestige, quality, and cost. I dislike my official Fujis the most, they are totems of wasted money and frustration (“Maybe this time I’ll get along with the autofocus!”). My old Soviet & East German lenses are okay, but I find myself playing pretend that they’re good and worth keeping going with (there’s a political joke somewhere there), they are just so cumbersome to use casually and using a mount adapter is always shit. Soviet lenses have not aged well, despite my misguided affection for that mess of history.
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Feb. 6, 2025
Continuing to place the viewfinder in the center of mirrorless cameras & continuing to include the weird pentaprism lump feels a bit daft, to me at least. Sure it looks the part (no accounting for taste) but it’s an awkward and a redundant hangover from the days when these things were physically required to be centeral on the camera body for the camera to work.
There’s no good reason for modern mirrorless cameras to continue to force the user to squish their noses against the back-screen in the age of digital. Rangefinder manufacturers figured this out decades ago; there wasn’t a physical requirement to have a pentaprism and central VF - so they didn’t, and now mirrorless cameras don’t need to either, so why continue to ape an SLR era compromise? Taste.
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