Dawn, at Dawn

Apologies everyone for another delay. This was a pre-prepared post I hadn't shared. Not sure what I'll do, to be honest. In any case, enjoy the photos--I think some of these are stunners.

Well, one of the unexpected advantages of winter, is that I was able to walk my way to a park to take photos soon after dawn... and didn't have to wake at 4am to be ready! In any case, my dragon Dawn, deserves to be photographed at dawn, as she invokes it.

Truth to be told, taking these photos was quite difficult. As you know, I shoot with adapted vintage lenses and leverage Sony's system to use focus peaks to help with manual focus (you can read more on my post here). The problem is that shooting with the high contrast levels that I wanted here totally screws the peaking system, and I was left to rely on my insticts.

Good thing that my photography instincts are so attuned!

In this case, I used my trusty Minolta 58mm f1.4 (from the '70s), and my Carl Zeiss Jena 100-300mm f3.5-5.6 (from 1962) to take this photos. Sharp as the sharpest thing. Vintage lenses are so amazing! If you think that because they are old they'll be "bad" or "not as sharp" as modern lenses... you are completely mistaking. They are equally sharp, are cheaper, and have a full metal body, meaning they are far more resilient; and since they're manual, they are far easier to fix as well.

These here are what I call "Dawn is summoning the sun", because the pose definitely seems to be that!