Seventies Focus

I did a bit of research on a lens I bought through eBay and found out it was made around 1971. It feels quite special to me to have something so precise, so delicate, so machined from nearly 50 years ago and it essentially be in perfect condition. There's a small amount of wear to the black paint on the focus ring, but that's nothing. It hardly cost me anything either, which reminds me of an episode of Antiques Roadshow recently where the valuer said 'Not everything old is valuable' when valuing a 2000 year old Roman vase as around £200. If I had an actual artefact someone made 2000 years ago I'd be in awe of it.

Talking of pots and TV, the 'Handmade in Japan' series was on BBC4 a while back and I think it's still on iPlayer. If you haven't seen it, give it a go. Lovely slow and reflective TV.

More modern technology continues to disappoint. I think my work Mac has the keyboard problem. It might just be dust, but who knows. I thought we had keyboards sussed by now. Sigh.

The cornflower and oriental poppy seeds I planted together both came up, and look gorgeous. This was taken with the lens I mention above, a Nikon 1:1.2 55mm lens. Fully open it has such a shallow depth of field everything looks dreamy and soft. i love it, but it is difficult to get what you want in focus.

The rest of the garden is looking pleasingly wild right now. There was a thing on Gardener's World (I know, more TV) about the loss of wildflower meadows in the UK and how some are being restored. I was happy to see how similar the ones they showed were to our own garden. Of course we don't have the species diversity yet, but what we have is definitely on the right track. I ordered a bunch of UK-sourced wildflower seeds too. They'll go in in the autumn.