Quest for the magnificent light

There are moments in our lives, which we never forget. Moments, when time slows down. Moments, when we know that we are in the right place at the right time. It is great to feel the essence of those moments again and refresh our own memories. So we take photographs... I check my older photos from time to time. I was just learning the basics, so many of them is not technically perfect or composition is not well thought. But many preserves exactly the moments I described above.   Today I would like to show a few pictures, which were taken after a summer storm. The date was 26th August 2004. It was a typical late summer day; really hot and dry. Strong east wind started to blow around 5 o'clock; clouds were travelling fast towards the west. Heavy downpour followed soon; it just ended not long before sunset. The sky became yellow thanks to the golden sunrays...   Yellow sky Metadata   Camera: Olympus E-10  Cloud factory Metadata ...

It's time to write about one of my favourite screw mount lens, the Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar 135mm F3.5 MC . First some words about the exterior. The lens is painted in black with white and red markings. It looks professional, and the colors nicely match Canon bodies as well. I showcase the lens here on a "retro" Praktica film body.     The front element   Side view   When you pick up the lens, you immediately realize that the build quality is good; it is made of lot of metal parts and some plastic. I heard that the internal contains more plastic in my late, red MC version; but its weight still shows that there is good old glass inside. :) Weakest point seems to be the aperture mechanism, but fortunately mine is pretty well-preserved, and don't have any mechanical problems. Aperture can be set between F3.5 - F22. There is a depth of field scale, as you can expect.   DOF scale  The lens has only...