The Bokeh of Various Lenses 2

i never got around to finishing this post. I wonder why? Anyway, a few summers ago I was experimenting with still life photography, using various pots and garden flowers, and various lenses. While I was doing this I thought it might be educational for me to take a series of photographs using the same subject and background using various of my lenses at their maximum aperture, so that I could get a feel for the quality of the out-of-focus areas (the bokeh, indeed). Having done that, I thought it might also be of interest to any other passing photographer to see the results.

The more obvious choices for such an experiment — the Canon 50mm f1.8, Autchinon 50mm f1.4, Helios 44-M 58mm f2, and the Sony SAL 50mm f1.4 — I covered in The Bokeh of Various Lenses 1. Here, the lenses are a little different to the lenses typically used in bokeh tests, and there is an experiment or two.

There is nothing scientific about this “test” or “comparison”. It is qualitative rather than quantitative. So, without further ado, let’s get into it. The photos were taken on either my Sony A99 or my Sony A7R2, depending on my adaptors and my mood.

The first lens is an old Minolta 35-70 f3.5. This was bought, along with the Minolta camera it was mounted to, for a mere £5 from a car-boot sale. Bargain! And I really like the lens. This was the kit lens for various models of Minolta autofocus film cameras, and for a kit lens, i think it’s very nice. It’s light too. This photograph was taken at 60mm at f4.5, probably the maximum at that focal length. The bokeh is a little harsh perhaps, a little sharp, a little jaggy. It reminds me a little of the out-of-focus areas of the Canon 40mm also included in The Bokeh of Various Lenses 1.

Sony A99, Minolta 35-70 f3.5-f4.5

The second lens is the Minolta 100mm f2.8 Macro. This does, I think have rather nice out-of-focus highlights, which can be very appropriate for backgrounds when you’re getting down low among the flowers. It can be sharp, too…

Sony A99, Minolta 100mm f2.8

Next up is a Pentacon 135mm f2.8. This has a thirteen-bladed iris I believe. I also believe this is known as a Bokeh Monster. I didn’t use it often, simply because the short end of my zooms overlapped with the focal length. However, it can be a very sharp lens when you get the focus right. It has nice, smeary bokeh. It might perhaps be a little busy for some tastes, but it’s not a harsh bokeh. This was taken on a different day to those above, when the light was grey rather than sunny.

Sony A7R2, Pentacon 135mm f2.8

Here’s another lens you might not have come across; this is the Soligor 105mm f4. This version has an m39 mount, and is mounted to the A7R2 via an adaptor. It’s a skinny little lens, probably designed for a Leica-style range-finder camera. It can be a bit of a pig to focus, but when it does focus it renders as a nice, old-fashioned, pretty sharp, low-contrast lens that might need a bit of work in post-processing. The out-of-focus areas are a tad busy. Not ugly, but less smooth than some of the others. (The wind had got up while taking the photos with this lens, and I could never stop the corner of the sheet flapping into view!)

Sony A7R2, Soligor 105mm f4

Ah, now that I reach the last photo, I think I remember why I stopped writing — I think I had a couple more lenses to add, but time was getting on. So then I thought I’d stop for a while, and a while has turned into a few years! I’m such a busy bee! However, I have no idea what the other lenses were now, so I’ll again stop here.

So there we are — a few more lenses added to the vast internet repository of lens examples. I hope somebody finds the information useful (You know who you are — you’re on eBay, searching the Web for examples of the lens you’re currently thinking of buying!)

A Chat About Some 28mm Primes

Somehow I’ve ended up with five 28mm manual-focus lenses – well, four 28mm and a 29mm – and I thought it was time I compared them all against each other, mainly to find out which of them I should keep. Keeping them all seems a bit… profligate… because, after all, the photos that result from each lens might all look exactly the same.

The following discussion is based on qualitative criteria, rather than quantitative. That’s just a fancy way of saying – I don’t know how to do tests which might indicate which lens is “best”, so I’m just looking at a couple of photos from each lens and going, “hmm, I like the look of that one.” In general, I wanted to get an idea of how the out-of-focus areas looked for each lens, and how sharp each lens looked at close to infinity.

Infinity-focusing was particularly interesting to me because the Pentacon 29mm has always seemed tricky to focus in that range. For that reason, I’ll start with this lens. I bought the lens because I’d seen images on Flickr where the lens had been used to focus on nearby objects with an f-stop around its maximum of f2.8, resulting in interesting out-of-focus areas –- or bokeh, if you will. Note, for all of the following photos I used a Sony a7r3, and I subsequently fiddled with them a little.

Here’s a shot, using the, Pentacon 29mm of a lovely pink-ish hollyhock flower – you will see much more of these flowers.

As you can see, the bokeh is a bit crazy, and is probably the craziest bokeh of all the lenses I’m about to show you. It would definitely have it’s place, I think, if I was getting down among wildflowers or photographing autumn leaves, where I might want to isolate a single leaf or flower and have interesting weirdness going on in the background.

Unfortunately, I’ve never yet been able to get this lens to focus on infinity or thereabouts.

This photo looks kind of all right, but if you crop into the tree at 100%, you’ll see the leaves are not quite in focus.

I was using focus peaking, but not the punch-in-focus-magnification-thing-y, and perhaps I should have done – but then I didn’t bother with any of that malarkey for any of the other photos, and as you’ll see all the others fare better than this one.

Here’s the Saitex 28mm, in M42 mount. I bought this a long, long time ago, originally to disassemble for use in a home-made tilt-shift, but experiments indicated that it wouldn’t cover the full-frame sensor were I to do so. The lens had been cheap, because, let’s face it, nobody knows who Saitex is, and it had been well-used so was rather scruffy. I would’ve made very little money if I had sold it on, so I just kept it. I’m glad I did. It’s a rather lovely lens I think. Here’s a hollyhock:

The bokeh is rather bland, but then sometimes that’s a good thing. Saitex are an obscure brand – they probably rebadged lenses made by Chinon, Tamron, Tokina and the like. I think I read somewhere that the 28mm is a rebadged Tamron. Here’s the wider photo:

And here is crop of the distant tree.

Again, like the Pentacon, this is not quite sharp (although better than that lens), and again that might perhaps be operator error. Nonetheless, I’ll be keeping this lens. It’s not worth the effort of selling, and it can certainly be sharp enough – you can find further examples in my Flickr album for this lens.

Let’s take a look now at a lens from a proper manufacturer: the Nikon Nikkor 28mm f3.5. Now, I know there’s a 28mm f2.8, but that is well-regarded and more expensive. I only bought this lens because I had never used a Nikon lens on my Sony cameras, and wanted to try one out, but I didn’t want to buy yet another 50mm lens. Here’s a hollyhock:

The bokeh neither offends nor delights, though I certainly find it more interesting than the Saitex.

Here, meanwhile, is the landscape photo:

The crop from this photo shows the lens to be sharper than those we’ve looked at before, and rather nicer overall, I feel.

We’ll continue with two other brands and both tht, unlike Saitex, should be recognisable names – Tokina and Vivitar.

Here’s the hollyhock as rendered by the Tokina:

The bokeh has a certain bubbliness which some of you might like. Here’s the tree:

And the detail of the tree:

Finally, we come to the Vivitar 28mm f2.8. Here’s another delightful hollyhock flower:

Interestingly, I only bought this to compare with the Nikon 28mm I’d recently bought, as I wasn’t sure whether the out-of-focus photos I’d taken at infinity were due to the lens or the adaptor. As it turns out, the adaptor seems to be very slightly imprecise, and infinity can be reached by focusing just back from where focus peaking indicates. This might be my overall favourite of the lenses. The out-of-focus areas are not too busy, yet there is enough blurriness to make the foreground stand out.

It’s time for that tree again:

And, for the final time, the distant leaves.

So what have we learned? For me, the Vivitar floats my boat, and the Pentacon has interesting bokeh. They’re not all as sharp as my modern, auto-focusing lenses. But isn’t sharpness sometimes is over-rated? Character! That’s what we want. So I’ll probably keep the Vivitar and Pentacon, and I’ll keep the Saitex by default, as the body is too bashed to sell.

Of course, an interesting caveat here is that I recently acquired a Fujifilm GFX50S on which I only intend using manual lenses, and it might turn out that completely different lenses look better on that giant sensor. I’m sure I’ll do an experiment at some point…

Exploring the Overgrown Road to Figheldean

Here’s an odd little road. I’ve only recently noticed the national speed limit applies signs at the beginning of this overgrown lane.

The start of the road to Figheldean

I’ve only recently noticed the signs because they’ve only appeared in the last few years, and that is because the main road from which this minor road deviates has recently had a 50-mph restriction placed on it. In fact, on the reverse of the sign you see in the photo above, there is a 50-mph speed limit sign because here this minor unrestricted road rejoins the restricted main road.

Ever since I first noticed these signs, I’ve been amused by the notion that the car ahead of me might suddenly indicate left and hurtle down the lane at sixty miles per hour on its way to Figheldean. This road is indeed the beginning of a loop that leaves the A345 and heads towards the villages of Figheldean and Ablington before curving back to rejoin the A345.

The old 25-inch to the mile Ordnance Survey map from the turn of the 20^th century shows the route clearly:

The area around Figheldean as shown on the large scale OS map of the early 1900s

The road heading north-south at the left of the image is the Marlborough-Pewsey-Salisbury road, now the A345. At the top-left hand corner of the map you can see the minor road turning off to the right (as you look at this map) and heading towards Figheldean. The route is even more obvious on the Andrews and Dury map of Wiltshire of 1773:

The area around Figheldean as shown on the Andrews and Dury map

Zooming into the OS map provides an interesting detail. The road to Figheldean did not cross the Avon via a bridge. It crossed it using fords across two channels of the Avon downstream of the corn mill at Figheldean.

The fords cross the Avon at Figheldean

The presence of these fords indicates that the road that turns off from the A345 did indeed once continue on to Figheldean. Interestingly, there are currently no signs warning that this is a no-through road, which suggests that the road remains a through route. Yet there is no road bridge across the Avon, which a driver would have to cross to reach Figheldean — there is only a footbridge. The absence of no-through road signs implies that, should a traveller desire, they could use the road and fords to access Figheldean. Of course, this would be impossible in most modern road cars, as the Avon would be too deep to safely ford. However, off-road vehicles, lorries, horses and carts would be able to ford the river.

I went for a walk down this road recently. It is obvious that no road traffic uses it, except perhaps for cycles or motorbikes. Perhaps it is only pedestrians and the occasional cyclist who now keep the centre of the old road clear, where you can see that it is still sealed with tarmac or asphalt.

Bushes and shubs encroach on the old road

Further down the road there are fewer shrubs, and it becomes possible to see the fences that delineate the boundary between the road and the fields. The road appears to be the typical width of a country road – wide enough for two cars to pass, perhaps.

The fences delineate the road, but grass still encroaches

Water meadows run along the river valley. In the past, water from the Avon would have been diverted into the meadows using networks of channels cut from the river to flood (or float) the fields. The road crosses these channels on simple beam bridges.

A channel off the river, from the road bridge

As noted above, the road should cross the main channel of the Avon via fords and then head into Figheldean. However, the entrance to the fords is now overgrown – you can only cross the river on a narrow footbridge. In fact, if we look downstream from the footbridge, we can see that both sides of the river – where the entrance and exit of the fords would have been – is covered in vegetation. That the fords have fallen into disuse is understandable, given that it would be impossible for most cars to cross the river here, especially in winter. However, as also noted earlier, certain classes of vehicle would be able to cross the river. And, until a road is stopped-up, I believe the council has a duty to maintain the fords as much as it has a duty to maintain a road or bridge.

The river downstream of the footbridge

It is odd, then that the road lacks no-through road signs. I’ve confirmed with Wiltshire Council that they still maintain this road, and that it hasn’t legally been stopped-up. What is even odder is that the road on the other side of the river, as it heads out of the fords and into Figheldean, has physically been stopped-up. There is a gate, bollards, fencing, and a security camera. All of this has been installed in recent years to prevent anti-social behaviour – the river at this point had become the focus of wild swimming, outdoor partying and hippie-buses, so the urge to restrict access to the river is understandable. But I’m left to wonder at the legality of this. That Wiltshire Council still maintains the road, that Southern Highways has placed speed-limit signs appropriately, and that the road has not been stopped-up, indicates that you should still be able to legally traverse this road in a motor vehicle, and could legitimately use it to access Figheldean, had the fords been maintained.

The road is worth a visit. It provides only a short walk, unless you include it in a longer circular route – for example, from Figheldean to Ablington, then to Milston, after which you could turn west to Hackthorn, cross the main road, head onto the Plain, then turn north on a byway for a while. But the fascination is the short road itself. It’s interesting to walk it, and note its fall into desuetude, to observe the encroaching shrubs and grass, the cracked asphalt, the sagging cables on the poles along the road, the scraggy bridge over the river channel, and the blocked fords. It is a road that is forlorn, but not lost. It is no longer a route, but it is still a way.

Why am I not Dylan Thomas?

I often hear voices as I fall asleep. That’s because I’m one of those people who likes to listen to the radio or television as they drift off. I can listen to the same program over and over, and I’ve recently been half-listening to television programmes about Dylan Thomas. One thing that caught my attention before Morpheus – not the character from The Matrix, but the cliché from the classics – took me in his arms was that Dylan Thomas had notebooks. In fact, as René Cutforth enthusiastically asserted in I Sing to you Strangers – first broadcast on BBC2 in 1983 – Dylan ‘did nothing much in his late teenage years but fill notebook after precocious notebook with poems’. And the first couple of times I heard René Cutforth say this, I thought, indeed, how very precocious! But then I also began to think: Why? Why would young Dylan fill notebook after precocious notebook with poems? Why would he be driven to do such a thing? Don’t teenagers have better things to do?

I’ve had a copy of Andrew Lycett’s biography, Dylan Thomas: A New Life, on my shelves for some considerable time. Finally, I had a reason to get it down and open it up. Why was Dylan filling notebooks? By the end of Lycett’s book, I was confident that one of the reasons I was not Dylan Thomas was because I was not – and never would have been – a short, bibulous, blustering, womanising Welshman. However, I was almost certainly a bombastic adolescent provincial bohemian, as Thomas described himself in his radio play, Return Journey. Many adolescents harbour fancy literary notions, and like to think of themselves as bombastic provincial bohemians. By the time my friends and I started to play with words, we were bohemians by default, as we’d begun to adopt hippie garb. It was, after all, the early 1970s, man. Later, we’d adopt a name for ourselves – the Decadent Aesthetes. We never took our name seriously, by the way; we regarded it with a kind of ironic detachment. It brought a smile to our lips. It was one of the ways we played with words.

Most of what the young Decadent Aesthetes knew about poetry – outside of song lyrics – was learned through our English lessons at school. Our English teacher was the kind of balding, pipe-smoking, grey-moustachioed, ex-World-War-2-Sergeant-Major type who gave his pupils three poems to learn by heart each term. Then, at the end of each term, he would randomly select various unfortunate pupils to recite one of the poems he’d given us. The Seven Ages of Man. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Ozymandias. Adlestrop. Sea Fever. All tip-top poems, I’m sure, but learning poems under pain of punishment put me off poetry for some time. I do remember, though, that I enjoyed learning about alliteration. I also remember those English lessons as grey. It was always raining outside. Nobody could remember the poems. The classroom was a place of tension, awaiting the announcement of a name, or the finger to lift and point.

And yet, despite the best efforts of this teacher, two of the Decadent Aesthetes did become writers, and three of us wrote poetry. Of course, we’ll probably never be acknowledged in our lifetimes, and we’ll each remain a “mute inglorious Milton”, as Gray wrote in his churchyard elegy. We certainly did not have notebooks that we precociously filled. I don’t know how we’d have ever come by the notion to fill notebooks. I know that one of the Decadent Aesthetes, John, did later start filling notebooks. He’d probably read somewhere that it was the kind of thing poets did. And he was technically Welsh, even if he didn’t yet know it. He was also to become bibulous – probably more so than Dylan Thomas.

So why did Dylan fill notebook after notebook with precocious poetry? Genius is often thought of as something other than the luck of genes or nurture. It’s seen as something God-given, or as inspiration from the great universal… something or other. Yet – unless you do believe in gods – genes and nurture are it. There’s nothing else. What advantages did the young Dylan have that the Decadent Aesthetes didn’t? Of the four friends who constituted our little gang of bombastic adolescent provincial bohemians – me, Chris, Phil and John – three of us were working class, and at least two of us, I’m certain, would have felt ridiculously pretentious if we’d carried around notebooks of precocious poetry.

Lycett’s biography indicates one way in which Dylan’s upbringing differed from ours. His father, known as DJ, was a teacher and headmaster at a local secondary school, the same school that Dylan was to attend. As Lycett notes, DJ wrote verse while a student, and contributed to student magazines. He also received “the only first-class degree in English to be awarded by any of the three University Colleges of Wales”. Alfred Janes, one of Dylan’s friends – he painted a famous portrait of the young Dylan Thomas with big brown eyes, curly fair hair and wearing a bohemian yellow tie – noted that DJ often read to Dylan, that he enjoyed reading to classes at the school, and only seemed to come alive when reading aloud.

The families of the Decadent Aesthetes, however, contained no teachers; there were no first-class honours graduates to guide us. Only John’s family were middle class, but his father was a bank manager, not an academic. At least John had access to books. I know space had been found for books on the shelves of Phil’s home, despite it being a small white caravan on a caravan site. There were very few books in my parents’ house – probably five or so. Chris also had access to very few books. In contrast, Dylan had access to DJ’s den, which was, Lycett writes, “lined with books from floor to ceiling”, and contained “nearly everything that a respectable highbrow literary library should contain”. Dylan would, Lycett adds, “sit in his father’s dim book-lined ‘den’ and read indiscriminately, until his eyes hung out”.

Dylan’s teenage friends were also nothing like us. The Kardomah Café crowd, as they became known after the Swansea café they frequented, were already bright young things who were, according to Lycett, witty, artistic and self-consciously affected. Their parents were not working class. The father of one friend ran the municipal art gallery, another was a Baptist minister whose poetry won an award at the National Eisteddfod in 1919. The mother of another friend wrote short stories. Dan Jones was probably Dylan’s greatest friend. His father – like John’s father – was a bank manager, but was also – unlike John’s father – a church organist and composer. The rest of the Jones family was similarly artistic and intelligent. Dan Jones, twenty months older than Dylan, was studious, liked poetry, played piano and also composed music.

So why am I not Dylan Thomas? Several answers are beginning to suggest themselves. My parents knew nothing, my English teacher was useless, and the Decadent Aesthetes were not blessed with artistic and intellectual families.

And yet.

As I delved further into the biography of the young Dylan Thomas, I began to notice similarities between us beyond being blustering bohemians.

Dan Jones and Dylan used to draft collaborative texts. They’d write poems and stories a line or paragraph at a time, for fun. This was something that Chris, Phil and I would also do. If Dan Jones is to be believed, he and Dylan began doing this when Dylan was eleven years old. We were less precocious, and had to wait until we were fifteen or so years old. That was when our blustering bohemian friend Phil moved away, and that was when we began to write letters to each other. These letters contained a mish-mash of gossip, absurdist ramblings – influenced by The Goons and Monty Python’s Flying Circus – and naïve philosophical speculation. Over time, the letters began to contain plays, stories and poems. By the age of seventeen, we were writing many, many words – one letter that Chris and I sent to Phil contained around 75,000 of them. I don’t think he read them all.

Even before this we’d been playing with words. Chris, Phil and I used to make hilarious – to us at least – improvised tape recordings, mini-plays if you will. The tape recorder could record and play back at two different speeds. We would record ourselves talking at the slowest speed, and then play it back at the higher speed, enabling us to sound like demented chipmunks on methamphetamine. Of course, these little vignettes would have been baffling to a wider audience as they were very personal to us and our friends – but, at the time, they were very, very hilarious. Oh, you should’ve been there! For us, this was the equivalent of Dan Jones and Dylan Thomas collaboratively writing songs and operas in their teens. Like Lennon and McCartney, my friend Phil recently said. Play is vital! Playing. That’s what Dylan and his friends were doing. And that’s what we were doing. We were simply not as precocious. And then, somehow, Dylan and Dan took what was play further than we ever did. Notebook after precocious notebook.

And yet.

Other parallels suggest themselves. Dylan and Dan produced a magazine, The Era. They did this while still much younger than us, of course. They were, after all, precocious. Because of their connections they managed to procure articles from other contributors, and DJ agreed to have his name on the mast-head. However, Dylan and Dan only ever produced one issue. Similarly, Chris and I also managed to produce one issue of a magazine. We were asked by the events manager at the technical college we attended to create a magazine that would entertain and inform our fellow students. We agreed this might be fun, and set about soliciting material from those fellow students while writing our own bohemian texts.

Of course, anybody who’s ever attempted to create a magazine from scratch knows that sourcing material, particularly for the first edition, is difficult. Almost impossible, in fact. We received a few titbits, but Chris and I valiantly wrote as much as we could, even desperately scraping text from old letters that made no sense to anybody but us. Finally, in September 1975 we typed what we had onto blue stencils, and hand-cranked fifty copies of the first edition of College Rap through a Roneo 250 duplicating machine.

Revisiting a yellowing copy of C. Rap – as we liked to call it – is interesting. It’s the poems that stand out. None of them, of course, are up to Dylan’s precocious standards; but even the worst of them are sunlit islands between blustery showers of ill-thought through prose. Dylan began one of his famous poems, “In my craft or sullen art”. Were we crafting our poems, or arriving at them through some sullen art? I’m not sure. To be honest, I’m not even sure what Dylan meant when he wrote that. Why so sullen, Dylan? We were dilettantes, novices, neophytes. We were learning to play with words; to craft them, I suppose. Play, as my fellow Decadent Aesthete Phil asserts, is vital!

Perhaps the lack of a café hindered our precocity. A café is intimate. A pub is… well, public. Noisy. Very sociable. Very distracting. When we were too young for pubs, the Decadent Aesthetes met for tea and coffee at each others’ houses, in kitchens and bedrooms. This just wasn’t the same as having our own Kardomah Café. After Phil moved away, his place was taken by another friend who also had intellectual aspirations (or, as my parents would say, fancy ideas). Terence was somewhat older than we were, but he saw in us people he could talk to about topics that interested him, psychology, books, the countryside and music. He was thrilled with the new world he found himself in. I remember him once, after a long discussion in his kitchen about deep and meaningful things, wishing we’d tape-recorded the conversation for posterity. We were all older now, and our social lives became centred around the noise and frivolity of the pub. We had a certain freedom there, with no parents to interrupt us, but many of our other friends were also there, the friends who didn’t care about Dylan Thomas and T S Eliot and Colin Wilson. We ended up talking about cars and girls, Top Shop and boys, cricket and girls, Boots No 7 and boys. It was not the Kardomah Café.

Within a couple of years, Chris and Terence, now eighteen and twenty-one years old respectively, moved to a big city to live with friends who had already decamped there. It was no surprise they wanted to move on, move out, break free, leave parents behind and live as they jolly well pleased. Life in the city promised to be more exciting than it was in our small provincial town. The city they moved to was… Swansea. The squat in which they ended up living was in Constitution Hill, near Cwmdonkin Drive where Dylan had been born, and had grown up. Dylan was becoming woven into our worlds. In 1976, I bought Dylan’s Miscellany One. I mentioned this in a letter to Terence, and in his reply, he said he was glad that I’d bought it, because he thought the play Return Journey was “absolutely brilliant – I would love to write something like that about our social group”. Which he could, of course, have done, had he the confidence of Dylan Thomas. Had his father been DJ. Chris, meanwhile, had become enamoured of another of Dylan’s short stories. “Read The Followers“, he commanded in a letter. “It could be any of us on a normal boring night”. He too, could have transformed any of our normal boring nights into a story. It was, after all, something we’d already done in letters to Phil. Perhaps if the Decadent Aesthetes had emerged from families full of artists, musicians, and writers, Chris would have had the confidence to write such a story himself.

Terence never really took to writing, though. He admired it. He read widely, and I remember he had a particular fondness for the metaphysical poets. But, if play is vital, it’s noticeable how much less playful Terence’s letters were than Chris’s. Terence’s letters were shorter, more factual, less likely to turn to flights of fancy. Never once did a story, play or poem randomly appear. When out on the town one weekend, Chris and Terence, along with our other Swansea-based friend Dave, met three girls. The three boys and the three girls continued to meet and once the possible permutations had been resolved, these girls became their girlfriends. Chris wrote four and a half foolscap pages of delightful prose about this meeting, prose that captured the essence of a night on the town and the excitement of a new encounter. Of this encounter, Terence wrote nothing. Chris had indeed “transformed any of our normal boring nights into a story”. Chris’s letters maintained the playfulness they’d had when we were writing to Phil. I thought that, of the two of them, Chris was the more natural writer; he understood the playfulness of it. Play is vital! After Terence gained his first degree in psychology, he began to study part-time for a Master of Philosophy degree. He dropped out of the course, however, as he felt isolated, that most of the academic support was going to the full-time students. If he had continued, I like to think he would have written interesting, but slightly dry, academic tomes and learned essays.

The Decadent Aesthetes slowly drifted apart. Chris and Terence had already moved to Swansea, then soon after to other places. I was soon to move to London, then Reading. John would also move to London, then Shropshire. Phil moved to York, then Newcastle, and then back to Devon. The group of friends who’d been excited by words and ideas were moving away from, and losing contact with, each other. Adult life and distance were beginning to get in the way. We all lost touch to an extent. We remained friends, but we were scattered. We had sensible jobs. We were no longer bohemians. The silliness, the humour, the playfulness that had bonded us could no longer easily exist.

John and I remained close to each other even as we moved around London and the home counties. We maintained a creative contact, swapping stories and poems. When Dylan was the same age as John and I had been when we lived in London, he had friends who wrote, friends who edited, friends who created music, intellectual friends everywhere, in London, Swansea, and America. He had the encouragement of those around him. He still had many of the friends he’d made during his precocious youth – many of whom, it seems, were more bohemian than us, and untroubled by such mundanities as jobs – friends he could visit and talk to about his writing.

John, Phil and I continued to experiment with writing, even though we didn’t have the same environment as Dylan, and even though we saw each other infrequently. I still write in various genres. I know that Phil still diligently writes a journal. Phil and I also continued to write playful letters to each other until the advent of email. I suspect that Chris no longer writes, although in our teens he probably created more words in the letters we wrote than John ever managed to write in poems and prose. Terence and John are, sadly, no longer with us.

So why am I not Dylan Thomas? Lord Chesterfield remarked, in his essay Upon Affectation, that the “soil must be cultivated, and the season favourable, for the fruit to have all its spirit and favour.” Our soil was never properly cultivated; it needed a good deal more tilling, and a good dollop of fertiliser. Blustering bohemians we might have been, but we had never properly developed our craft. Compare Dylan. Most of Dylan’s published verse originated in one form or another during four short years, from 1930 to 1934 – that is, between the ages of sixteen and twenty. He was writing at an age when we were still trying to work out who we were, what we could do. We liked to write, but we had no encouragement, except the encouragement we gave each other. Could I – could any of us – have been Dylan Thomas? Possibly. Like Dan and Dylan, we wrote, and like them, we played with words and ideas. Play is vital! But our fathers were not DJ, our parents were not curators of museums, or composers. We had no Kardomah Café. Our friends were not Dan Jones or Alfred Janes. Our backgrounds were all wrong. Our season was never favourable.

Beverley

John was good with words. He was one of the first people I met at Kingdown, the comprehensive school in my home-town. Warminster was a military town with a REME workshop. Kingdown groomed many of its pupils for an apprenticeship with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. It was a fine apprenticeship, and my parents would have been content had I ended up apprenticed there. And for a while, I too was content that I would end up there. If I ended up instead so educated, if I ended up instead going to polytechnic, studying for post-graduate degrees and spending my adult life writing, it is, in large part, because of John.

Back then, in the late, late 1960s, we all took the 11+ exam that sifted us into those who’d get the chance to study at the grammar school, and those who’d be dumped into a comprehensive. I failed the 11+. At Kingdown – for reasons I’ve never quite understood – I was placed in the first, or top stream, with the clever boys and girls. Not that we were that clever, as a teacher reminded us soon after we’d started. “You might be in the top stream here,” he said, “but you’d be in the bottom stream at the grammar school.” That was unfair, and untrue. We weren’t all at Kingdown because we’d failed the 11+. Some pupils didn’t want to travel, or wanted to stay close to their friends, and some had been sent there by their parents.

John’s parents were middle-class and well-off. His father was a troubleshooter for a national bank, who had been dispatched to Warminster to sort out a troubled branch. His mother was a housewife, who stayed at home to look after John and his younger sister. John had learned to read at an early age, and his reading abilities only improved further when his parents tasked him with reading The Times to his partially-blind grandmother. He was a precocious middle-class boy who’d passed the 11+, and could have gone to any of the local grammar schools. Yet his parents preferred that he go to the local school.

Who knows what attracts us to our friends? Much of it is, I believe, luck, or contingency. Being placed in the first stream separated me from all the friends I’d made at primary school. I was in a class among strangers. John’s family had arrived in town during the summer holidays; he had no friends at all in the town or the school. I can’t remember now how or why John and I started talking. Perhaps a teacher sat me next to him in a class. Perhaps I one day found an empty chair next to him. However we found each other, a tentative friendship began to form.

John was a small, fey boy with a stutter, and dark-skinned in a southern-European way. That he was already well-educated was obvious to me. I was a simple Wiltshire boy. I’d always lived in Warminster. I wasn’t at all well-educated, although my reading age was, I’d learned at primary school, two years ahead of others in my age-group. John and I were both shy. I did, though, know people who’d been with me in primary school – even though they were in other streams – which enabled me to be a little more sociable. Perhaps John was attracted to me because I offered a route into other friendships. Certainly, by the time of the 1970 FA Cup Final between Leeds and Chelsea our friendship was already firm enough that he invited me to the large house in which he lived to watch the replay on television. John was a Chelsea supporter, so had a particular interest in the game, but as I followed Spurs the game held little interest for me. What I remember is sitting on the floor, talking, the television flickering in the background, the light of a late April evening coming through tall windows into a large room – that his parents would have called the lounge, but I would have called the front room – lit by standard lamps, and yet, somehow, still grey.

John and I made another friend during the first year, a gangly lad called Chris. I had first become acquainted with Chris through a mutual sense of humour and Airfix kits. John, Chris and I visited each other’s houses, and began to discover music. John occupied a large, dim attic at the top of his parent’s large grey house. The attic had been split into two rooms, a bedroom and a small sitting-room. It felt like a flat – very grown-up. We usually ended up in John’s attic because there we could listen to music much more loudly than at Chris’s house. We rarely visited my house, as I lacked the essential record player.

John became a fan of T. Rex – Electric Warrior had just been released – and he worked his way through the back catalogue. The lyrics of the early songs were concerned with fairies, elves and unicorns, and the albums had titles like My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair… But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows. Song lyrics provided an alternative to the poetry we were forced to learn by an old-fashioned English teacher with a pipe and moustache and a penchant for naming his canes. If there is one sure way to remove glamour from poetry, it is to make teenagers learn by rote poems they do not like. The Village Schoolmaster? Elegy in a Country Churchyard? I now love Adlestrop, and have a soft spot for Sea Fever – I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky – but at the time they were simply words we had to somehow jam into our brains and later retrieve with unerring accuracy to ensure we weren’t punished.

What the words of the glam-rock pixie, Marc Bolan, showed us was that lyrics could be concerned with more than moons in June and who loved whom. This became even more evident when we discovered prog-rock. So inspired was John that he began to write his own lyrics. This would eventually lead us to form our own band, but that’s another story for another day. What John’s lyrics showed me was that anybody could write, and that writing could be fun. So I began writing too. If Marc was John’s inspiration, John was mine.

John’s teenage years were troubled, though – more troubled than those of we simple Wiltshire lads. Chris and I didn’t quite understand why. John had his gloomy rooms at the top of the house – almost a decadent artist’s garret – that his parents rarely troubled. He had money for records, books and later, cigarettes, and could play his music as loudly as he liked. He would swear outrageously at his parents and his sister – using words unfit for this essay – lose his temper, and, when only a little older, experiment with uppers and downers. He told us, a few years later, that he’d been adopted, and we understood then at least one source of his anger.

In 1972, in the third year at Kingdown, we gained another friend, Phil, whose family had recently moved to the town. For the next couple of years, we were a tight little group, discovering more bands, more lyricists, UFOs, horror films, the occult, and the fag-end of the hippie era. We began reading more, fell out with each other, walked on the hills, scared each other in graveyards, and John would occasionally blow his top and ignore us for days. Then Phil’s family moved on again, to Devon. We’d all started experimenting with writing to a greater or lesser degree, and when Phil sent us a letter from Devon, we entered into a correspondence that would last for years. If I have any writing style at all, it’s because of all the letters I wrote to Phil. Meanwhile, John and I had moved on from writing lyrics to writing poems, and would soon start writing short stories.

We all remained friends through the 1970s, and sometimes visited Phil in Devon. In the summer of 1976, John’s grandmother died and left him £50, which was a lot of money at the time. What else could an eighteen-year-old boy do with such riches, except buy Genesis and Van de Graaf Generator albums, pre-Raphaelite and David Inshaw prints for the attic walls, Pernod and Mattheus Rosé, and cup-cakes. Ah, that tall glass of Pernod, water and ice, pale yellow and cool on a hot summer’s day. Did John’s problems with drink begin then? We’d all been visiting pubs since we were under-age, so John and Chris were no strangers to alcohol – I still preferred lemonade, lime, soda water and ice – but Pernod was something different. It was a spirit. It seemed exotic. It was a drink to take at leisure, not under the constraints of draconian drinking laws. The summer of ’76 was when we laughingly began calling ourselves the decadent aesthetes – laughingly, because we didn’t think ourselves decadent at all. Yet perhaps we were, with our interests in the occult, Pernod and poetry, and our first experiments with illegal drugs. Perhaps we were like Aleister Crowley or Arthur Symons. Her cheeks are hot, her cheeks are white; the white girl hardly breathes tonight. It was the summer of ’76, and we were eighteen – a time for fanciful notions. But only John could truly afford the decadence of Pernod and cup-cakes.

As John matured, his temper cooled – although I now sometimes wonder whether this was the result of maturity, or of vodka. He and I shared similar interests in music and books, and I think he felt closest to me. He once added a note in one my letters to Phil that “Steve is still Steve, and as such is the only person I talk to about things like what I like to talk about” – yes, he was pretending that he couldn’t write. He and Phil went on to study A-level English, and before we knew it we were all under the influence of T S Eliot and Ted Hughes, and discovering Orwell, Huxley and Kafka.

I would never have been able to convince my working-class parents that A-levels were worthwhile – they understood the value of apprenticeships, they didn’t understand the value of English and Sociology. There was little drama about this; I simply understood I’d be going to the REME. But as we came closer to leaving school, Chris and I found that we, like John and Phil, wanted to carry on into further education. Chris found a route to college for us – an engineering diploma. The course was practical enough to mollify my parents, even though I would earn no money and therefore not be able to pay my way, as all good working-class boys should do. Although the school had been grooming us for the REME, Chris and I wanted to rebel against that, and the diploma was our rebellion. Of such small things are revolutions made.

As the end of our A-levels and diplomas came into view, John and Phil inevitably began to discuss university, and this began to influence my thinking. I too wanted to carry on with my education. I felt, though, that I needed to learn something other than engineering. That felt a bit… well, square, man. Again, I would need to persuade my parents that a degree would benefit me in the future. When I told them that the course I was interested in had the word “Technology” in its title, and noted that I would get a grant, and that I would be moving out of the house, they soon agreed.

John surprised us all and didn’t go to university. He’d lost interest in his Maths A-level, and simply stopped turning up. He had no interest in taking another A-level. More surprisingly still, he got a job in a place so very square it could have been the Platonic ideal of squareness – the tax office. He moved to a tax office in London, while I was at polytechnic there, and we again shared our writing with each other. But he seemed much more insecure about his writing than I was. Although he wanted criticism, he didn’t take it well, and in the end the sharing stopped.

John had always struggled with the idea that he might never be the next T S Eliot or Dylan Thomas. Would he read anything he’d written, he once asked himself; the answer was no. But can any of us properly judge our work? It’s always difficult to know what an audience will make of it. John knew this, but couldn’t reconcile himself to the uncertainty. Still, he continued writing for a while, even if he was uncertain of his talents. He especially revered poets and lyricists, and wanted to be the best he could, as good as those he admired. However, therein lurked danger. If you already drink heavily, then Dylan Thomas and Charles Bukoswski might prove perilous role models.

In the end, John never wrote enough. He asked too much of himself. He now had a full-time job he enjoyed. He’d moved into computer programming, and discovered he had an aptitude for it – so much so that later in life his employers considered him indispensable. John and I had, in many ways, swapped roles. I wrote more than he did, and I’d carried on my education. I’d become the “intellectual”, while he’d become the “office-drone” he’d railed against when younger. Over the years, I’ve often wondered what would’ve happened had I not met John. Would I be writing now? Would I have ever learned to appreciate Adlestrop? Would I have Inshaw prints on my wall? What I now am I owe, in part, to John.

John told me he’d made me an executor of his will. “Don’t worry,” he added, “I’m not about to die.” I worried, however, that he might just do that. We were in our late-forties now. He never exercised. His diet consisted of panetellas, roll-ups, vodka, and toast and Marmite. I suspected he might be an alcoholic. It wasn’t until he died a couple of years later, however, and I started on the task he’d assigned me, that I realised the full extent of his problem. That was when I found the vodka bottles – empty and full – hidden in cupboards all over his house.

After John had moved to Warminster from London, he’d grown to appreciate the countryside he found there. He loved the West Country, the hills and downs, the trees and rivers. He liked to imagine he’d been conceived somewhere around the town, out on a hill, perhaps the result of a brief love affair between a squaddie and a young local girl who was unable to keep the baby. Changelings – elf-children placed with unknowing human parents – feature in his stories. I believe that is how John sometimes thought of himself – that he’d come from somewhere other, had been placed with a family who didn’t quite understand his elfin ways.

When sorting through his papers, I came across a birth certificate for Beverley Donkin. Who is this, I wondered. Then I realised – it was, of course, John. Beverley Donkin. It was a surprising name for one so fey. It still surprises me now when I think about it. He’d been born in Wales. I know that John had toyed with meeting his birth mother, but had decided against it. He knew that his adoptive parents – the ones he’d moaned about, argued with, swore at, the ones who had tolerated all of that – were his real parents.

It’s odd to think – now I’ve held the birth certificate of this other person in my hand, this other person who was also my friend – that Beverley might have stayed in Cardiff, might have spoken with the lilting rhythms of South Wales, might have learned to love the sea as John had learned to love the downs. If John had never been adopted into the well-off family with the myopic grandmother and the tolerant parents, he might not have become the reader he was, the writer he was, the inspiration he was.

Watchfield!

Note: This is the second in a series of ad hoc life-writing exercises, published in this blog to enable friends to find it easily. Should any of these exercises ever interest anybody else, well, that’s a bonus…

August, 1975. A summer that would have been remembered as one full of halcyon days of lingering heat and clear, warm nights, were it not for the fact that it was followed by the summer of 1976, which was even more full of outstandingly blue, hot, dazzling days that were followed by long, languorous nights. (Sigh.) But enough of 1976. Let’s get back to 1975.

The last week of August and the beginning of September were full of adventures for me. Not mountain climbing or skydiving kind of adventures. There were journeys, and friendship, and music, and sunshine.

On Sunday the 24^th of August, my friend Terence and I helped our friend Colin deliver a piano to Virginia Water. Colin was attempting to start a removal or transportation business. He couldn’t carry a piano into a house by himself, and it would look unprofessional to ask the owner of the piano to assist in the delivery, so he’d asked for help from his friends. There was no money involved, although drinks were presumably promised, and somehow Terence and I ended up volunteering our assistance. We were all friends, so, really, what better than to kick back on a sunny Sunday afternoon and travel in a Tranny from Wiltshire to Surrey?

The previous night, I’d been to Cradle Hill, where an anniversary skywatch[i] had been held to mark ten years of the Warminster Thing. Terence, Colin and I discussed this event as we travelled to Virginia Water. The skywatch had certainly been exciting, and carnivalesque. Exciting, because during the early hours we had heard the screams of a terrified woman – or a woman acting terrified – and we had seen UFOs flying low overhead – almost certainly balloons with lights attached, given the way they moved. Carnivalesque, because there had been quite a large crowd on the hill, and a mood of excitement and anticipation. Despite the screams, the atmosphere had been light, almost frivolous. Our discussion of the event as we travelled up and down the A30 led to us to agree to visit Cradle Hill that evening, on our return to Warminster.

When we arrived at the hill, it was warm and still, but there were fewer skywatchers than there’d been the previous night. We sat on the bank beside the road, chatting inconsequentially, watching the sky, hoping to see visitors from outer space, but, frankly, never expecting such a thing to happen. We talked a little sceptically, and a little irreverently, about the goings-on around us. We were separate, as always, from the other skywatchers – a part of the congregation, as it were, but somewhere near the back, ready to run for the door. Our irreverence and scepticism had intrigued one lone skywatcher, who asked if he could sit with us, as he found the other skywatchers a little too intense. His name was Geoff, and he stayed with us for the rest of the night and a good part of the next day.

We must have got around to talking about music, and gigs, and festivals, because at some point during the night we began to chat about the free festival at Watchfield, in Oxfordshire. This festival was a state-sanctioned replacement for the Hyde Park Free Festival, which had fallen foul of the authorities the year before. We decided it might be fun to go there the next day. Colin would drive us in his car, and Geoff was happy to tag along

We left the hill having seen nothing, and we all, except for Geoff, went home for a nap and a wash and brush-up. We agreed to meet Geoff in town later. In the better light of early dawn, we noticed that Geoff appeared to be wearing a business suit, which seemed rather odd for a skywatcher. Terence later wondered if Geoff was in fact an alien who had only a limited understanding of earthly apparel. This led us to further speculate whether, to paraphrase Arthur Shuttlewood[ii], Geoff had, after we left him, wandered to the park lake to undertake some Venusian ablutions.

By early afternoon, we had arrived at Watchfield, Colin, Terence and I, and the bloke we found on Cradle Hill. We saw the bands Rich Mitzi and Strife, although I don’t remember them at all. We discovered our friends Angelina and Mary were also there, and I was delightfully interrupted by Mary for a moment. I can only recall Watchfield as a blur of sensations; few moments or events of the day have stuck in my memory. Except for Mary. Perhaps the best way to explain this is via poetry (and be thankful that it wasn’t via the medium of interpretive dance).

In 1975 the man moved
The Windsor Free
Festival to Watchfield.
Watchfield? Where the fuck?

Still, we thought we’d go,
Terence and Colin and I,
And some guy we had
Discovered during the night,
Skywatching on Cradle Hill.

We idled with the other freaks,
Under a sun that was Californian,
Drifted past spice islands
Scented with patchouli and
Sandalwood, joss-sticks and sweet hash.

The irritating bluebottle of bad music
Followed us wherever we went. Then:
A long, drawn out, squeal cut through it,
My name held on a dotted breve
Somewhere above the C above middle C.

And suddenly my arms were full of Mary,
Her arms around my neck, her legs
Around my waist, her smiling mouth
So close to mine, our faces hidden
Behind the penumbra of her long curly
Hippie hair, her brown eyes sparkling.

Then: She kissed me.

I still have the badge.

Angie and Mary in 1975 (not at Watchfield)

At some point, Angie and Mary left us to chase after other freaks. At some other point, Geoff also left us. After we’d tired of the bands, bad turntable music, and the smell of frying food, we made our way back to the car. Terence had picked up a copy of the Watchfield Freek Press, from which we discovered that the anarchic free festival was full of problems and whinging.

The free press relates the bad vibes, man

Then Colin drove us home as only Colin could; we appeared to arrive in Warminster before we’d even left, such was the rapidity of the journey. I fell asleep in the back seat much to my horror, as I’d wanted to stay awake to ensure that Colin didn’t fall asleep at the wheel.

As if this I hadn’t been enough excitement already, the next day, I went to Devon to see my friend Phil. This was my second visit to Devon. In an earlier post I related how I went to Devon to stay with Phil in early 1975, and how that had been my first holiday without my parents; yes, I had my friend’s parents to contend with, but still, Phil and I could drift around doing what we wanted, going for long walks, visiting the beach, reading, listening to music, and so on. I’d enjoyed that visit so much, I’d always intended to return as soon as I could, and August that same year provided an opportunity to do so. Back in March I had gone to Phil’s with our friend Chris. This time, I was going alone.

I can’t remember whether I went by train or hitch-hiked. I can’t have started early after the preceding three days of late nights, which makes me wonder if I went by train. I imagine that Phil and I did little the evening I arrived.

It was a warm week, I remember that. Phil and I went out wandering the lanes, visiting Torbay and Totnes. I suspect that it was probably during this holiday that we had a sham seashell fight on the beach at Paignton. Razor shells can be deadly. As usual, I probably channelled the spirit of Duncan Idaho[iii]. I also believe we might have been acting out for some girls who were sitting on the concrete walkway somewhere near the café close to the Pavilion.

Sometime later in the week we went to Totnes and met Heather and Dian at a park. I remember them singing Counting Out Time by Genesis. I was rather taken by Heather, with her long blonde hair and the incongruous yet somehow stylish red dressing gown she wore, which was long enough to sweep the dust of the asphalt beneath the swings.

Later, we went to see some of Phil’s college mates playing in a band in a hall. Were we aware of this gig, or did Heather or Dian invite us along? However we arrived there, it was fortuitous, because the drummer for the band never turned up. As I was a drummer, I said I’d stand in. So the band thrashed around some modern standards – I remember playing along to some Hendrix – and despite the headache, I enjoyed myself. I was, Phil’s friend Jeremy later excitedly asserted, a mixture of John Bonham and Mel Pritchard[iv].

I also recall an afternoon on Dartmoor, perhaps on the Saturday. We had a picnic with Phil’s mum and his guardian, Chris. We went there in Chris’s Land Rover. I distinctly remember – although possibly in a reconstructive and imaginary way – clambering over grey rocks with a red sun in a hazy sky as evening approached.

On the last day of August, Sunday the 31^st, Phil and I went to Torquay Town Hall to see Greenslade. It was an enjoyable gig, and we hung around afterwards, in the hope of having a chat with the band – although I was actually hanging around in the hope of convincing Andy McCulloch to let me have a go on his rather lovely double bass drum Ludwig kit. However, we only saw a roadie, and I didn’t have the courage to ask him for a go on the kit.

What surprised me when I recently looked up the gig on setlist.fm was that there had been a support act – and the support act had been Judas Priest. I found it difficult to believe at first, until I found somebody on Facebook had a poster of the event. Judas Priest and Greenslade seem such unlikely bedfellows, and I have absolutely no memory of a raucous warm-up act.

It’s true! Greenslade and Judas Priest on the same bill

The next day, the first day of September, I returned to Warminster, not knowing then how the last couple of weeks of travel and adventure would remain lodged in my mind.[v] They were, you might say only, prosaic adventures, simply quotidian experiences that seem at the time merely a day in the life of, yet somehow they end up being recallable, recollectable — they become jewels ready to sparkle again in the right ray of sunlight.

---

[i] The history here is actually a little hazy. None of the friends with whom I’m still in contact are certain that they went to the anniversary skywatch, and I’m not entirely sure what date it was held. But it being on the Saturday of the bank holiday weekend makes sense.

[ii] Arthur Shuttlewood was the author of many books on the Warminster mystery.

[iii] Duncan Idaho is the heroic master swordsman and all-round brilliant fighter of the Dune novels.

[iv] I probably don’t need to explain who John Bonham is, but Mel Pritchard was the rather good and underrated drummer of Barclay James Harvest, whose splashy style I rather admired.

[v] Although it should be noted that the immediacy of these memories has been aided by my revisiting the letters of the time, and reminiscing over the years with Phil and Terence.

Revisiting My Old Manual Focus Lenses

I’ve recently been wondering if I have too many lenses. I’m not a collector, and only pick up old manual lenses for fun, to give me a different starting point in my photography. I was beginning to think that going out with three camera bags in the car was perhaps a little excessive. I was looking at the manual focus lenses, and wondered if I needed all of them. Perhaps, I thought, I should sell some. But before I did such a thing I first needed to experiment with them, to remind myself of their qualities and any pitfalls in using them. As it turns out, I like most of them, and probably won’t be selling them. They all have slightly different contrast and sharpness, and different ways of rendering out-of-focus areas, which gives different starting points for photographs.

This post is a non-technical, non-scientific look at them. First up is the Helios 44-2. Famed for its swirly bokeh, it was unlikely I’d get rid of this one anyway. Still, it was useful to compare it to the other lenses. In this photo, it is used on a Sony A7RII. This photo shows off the swirliness rather well.

Helios 44-2 50mm f2, on Sony a7RII using M42 mount adaptor

One lens that has surprised me a little is a Cosina Cosinon-S 50mm f2, the kit lens on old Cosina SLR cameras. I was given the Cosina by somebody I knew as a non-working camera. I tried selling the lens on eBay, but nobody ever seemed interested. I thought I might as well try out the lens myself. Back then, my only camera was a Sony A99, while the Cosina is a Pentax K mount camera. The adaptor used to adapt K mount to A mount required a glass element in it. When I used the Cosinon on the adaptor, it never seemed quite sharp enough. And I could still never sell it. So it hung around my house, unused.

However, when I got my first Sigma sd Quattro, I discovered that the the Sigma mount is based on the Pentax K mount. The auto-stopdown lever on the Cosinon got in the way of the Sigma mount, but I “adapted” the lens (that is, I deliberately broke it) so that it would work on the Sigma. I eventually replaced my A99 with a Sony a7RII, so I bought a K mount adapter to use this and another K mount lens on it. Having done these things — which meant there was now no additional glass between the lens and the sensor — it turned out the Cosinon is also a nice lens, usable on both cameras. Again, it has a certain look that is different to modern, high-contrast, very sharp lenses, which makes it worth using as an experimental starting point.

Cosina Cosinon-S 50mm f2 (K mount) on a Sigma sd Quattro

One lens I do like but don’t use often enough is the Pentacon 135mm f2.8. 135mm is a troublesome focal length for me. When I go out to take photographs, a Sony FE 200-600G is mounted on the A7RII, and the Sigma has the 30mm 1.4. The 200-600G stays on the Sony until such time as I decide I need a wider lens. Birds and animals move, but scenery doesn’t, so I’d rather have the long zoom ready for action, rather than a landscape-oriented lens. And, practically, the short end of the zoom is close enough to 135 (especially with a crop) that I don’t think of getting a 135mm lens out of the bag. And yet the Pentacon is a nice lens, with interesting bokeh. It is has a 13-blade iris that renders out-of-focus highlights as circles, and it can be respectably sharp.

Pentacon 135mm f2.8 on a Sony A7RII

If there is one vintage manual lens that always surprises me, it is my Saitex 28mm f2.8. I originally bought this lens to disassemble for use in a home-made tilt-shift lens, but when experimenting I found that if the lens was tilted, the image wouldn’t cover the sensor of a full frame camera. So I put the Saitex back together, and started using it for fun. Then I found that, even though it is some kind of cheap no-name import, it has a really nice look to it. Certainly not as sharp as a modern lens, but sharpness can sometimes be over-rated.

Saitex 28mm f2.8 on a Sony A7RII

It also seems to work well on the Sigma sd Quattro.

Saitex 28mm f2.8 on a Sigma sd Quattro

As it turns out, the only lens I’m likely to get rid of is a Pentacon 24mm f 2.8, which for some reason never seems to focus on either the Sigma or Sony camera. Whether this is a problem with the lens, or user error – perhaps I need to focus just backward of maximum focus peaking — I’m not yet sure. I’ll do some more experiments. This does mean, however, that fewer lenses than expected will be leaving the house, so I’m not quite sure where in the bags the lens I bought yesterday will go when it arrives.

Steve’s First Trip to Devon

Note: This is the first in what will probably become a series of life-writing exercises, published in this blog to enable friends to find it easily. Should any of these exercises ever interest anybody else, well, that’s a bonus…

I first went down to Devon in 1975. My friend Phil had moved there in the autumn of 1973. I knew Phil from secondary school, where he was also friends with my friends Chris and John. Phil had lived in the same town as us for a couple of years, those formative teenage years when we began to share the same tastes in music, books and other aspects of culture, such as the occult, the supernatural and UFOs, thus making us deeply repugnant to the girls in the school. Phil’s mother and guardian were, however, restless, and they found a house on the edge of Torbay, and so Phil left us.

When Phil moved to Devon, we never supposed we’d all remain in contact for many years afterwards. Why should we suppose such a thing? We were young, and people move on. But Phil’s parents returned to Warminster occasionally to visit friends, enabling Phil to also visit us; and he took the step of actually writing a letter to us, which encouraged us to write back, initiating a long-lasting epistolary exchange. And as soon as we were old enough, having maintained this contact, we started visiting each other.

Chris and I first made plans to visit Devon during the summer of 1974, and various close and not so close friends had toyed with the idea of joining us. After all, what young person wouldn’t like the idea of a trip to Devon? To be sixteen-ish and to have a holiday without parents? Of course, Phil’s mum and guardian would be there to watch over us part of the time, but we could visit Torquay, Paignton, Totnes and Brixham alone, without grown-up concerns shaping our days.

Unfortunately, in the end I couldn’t go. I don’t know why. I almost certainly had no money. I was never keen on shelf-stacking, whereas Chris would happily slave in Gateways in exchange for the money required to feed his appetite for books and albums. I simply visited his house and listened to his music, and bought very cheap second-hand books with my paltry pocket-money. I probably had a paper-round, but money from that was almost certainly used to maintain my drum-kit.

So, in July 1974, Chris alone made the trip to the house on the hill in Marldon. Phil was by now going out with his first girlfriend, Alison, and Chris returned with tales of the fun he’d had down there, how great Alison was, the walks they’d gone on, the places they’d visited. Chris was now, in a way, different. He now had knowledge and experiences I hadn’t.

Chris and I made a plan to visit over the Easter break in 1975. This time, I was determined to go. This would be my first holiday without parents. I was sixteen and three-quarters, Chris was seventeen and half. This was to be the only time Chris and I went to Devon together, and I think this might have been Chris’s last visit to Phil’s.

Chris and I hitch-hiked down to Devon on the 27^th March. The hitch was  smooth, and we arrived at Phil’s relatively quickly. There is nothing really memorable about the hitch, except I do remember that one of our lifts dropped us off on the A303 near Wincanton. There was no bypass then, and the road to the west of Wincanton was  twisty. We had to walk quite a long way to find a safe and practical spot at which vehicles were likely to stop and pick us up.

The house in which Phil lived occupied an enviable position just off the Torbay ring-road, on a hill outside the village of Marldon, with a view of the sea at Torbay. All around were fields and lanes waiting to be explored. Close by was Blue Mountain (which wasn’t really a mountain). There were footpaths to Torquay and Paignton, although I don’t remember visiting either of them on this trip.

What remains most memorable about this visit is snow. Just after we arrived it began to snow. A soft, slow fall of wet, heavy flakes that was to persist into the evening. As it fell into the night enough settled to leave a thin covering of wet snow and slush the next day. For the week we were there the weather remained cold or cool and often grey.

Our three protagonists brave the elements

We slept in a caravan parked in the drive. We had as many spare sheets and blankets, sleeping bags and coats as we could muster to keep us warm. Before we got into our beds we read by, and were kept warm by, gas burners on the wall. Using these, however, caused condensation to form on the walls and windows as the water vapour from the burning gas met the cold metal and glass of the caravan. The heat quickly leaked away through the thin walls once the burners were off. We were young, though, and covered by many layers. Rather than the cold, what I remember is droplets of water running down the walls, and the smell of the gas burners, which is almost impossible to describe as no immediate analogue comes to mind. I think, perhaps, it is the smell of burnt propane and hot ceramics.

The next morning, there was still some snow cover on the hills, and the sun came out.

Marldon in the snow

I recall very little of the rest of the week, except the notions the photos trigger. There was a lot of walking over the few days we were there. It was cold to begin our visit, as evidenced by the snow and the coats.

Phil’s dandruff was bad that week

One thing I do remember is that I read George Bernard Shaw’s “Back to Methuselah”. Even now, I’m convinced, in an off-hand, amused way, that I’m going to live until I’m 150 simply because I desire to do so, and by some Lamarckian magic my desire will change my genes to enable such a feat.

Phil, meanwhile – trapped as he was on a hill a long way from the people at school he’d only recently got to know, and having split with Alison – had been unable to ramble at anybody for days before we arrived. Thus, we were subjected to a panoply of his fantastic notions and theories. By the time we left, he’d lost his voice. Some might say it was unfortunate for Chris and me that events happened in that order.

As the week progressed, the weather slowly warmed, as can be seen by the change in outer wear. Here are a couple more images from our walks around the lanes. Our coats have become more lightweight, so the weather had certainly become more clement.

Our heroes explore the lanes

In this picture I’m wearing my black military blouson. I had a thing for blousons. This is, I believe a Civil Defence blouson, and had CD buttons (which should, of course, have been removed). Later, I would sport RAF blousons.

Meanwhile, in between rambling interminably, Phil found time to practice his Frog Dance.

One of the exquisite moves performed during the Frog Dance

We went to Brixham, that much is certain, because I describe what I thought about it in a letter to Phil in 1976. I was impressed with Brixham; the harbour and harbourside, the architecture, the houses climbing up the sides of the hills, and the arcades and amusements. The whole trip to Torbay left a distinctly watery residue in me. Not only was there Brixham, but I could see from the dining room at Phil’s house the sea at Torbay and large ships at anchor there. Later, after I’d returned to Wiltshire, I had a dream about Brixham and a sunken ship. The dream went something like this, although this retelling contains the kind of rhetorical flourishes that forty years of writing and rewriting has wrought:

I walked around Brixham harbour. At least, it looked like Brixham harbour. No – it didn’t even look exactly like Brixham harbour. It felt like Brixham harbour, though. I was there with Phil and Chris.

The tide was very high and lapped at the very top of the grey harbour walls. And on this particularly warm, blue and sunny day in Devon, the harbour waters were clear. Not just the clarity of unusually clean Channel water – unpolluted by oil and diesel slicks, crisp packets, polystyrene cups, unsullied by the shit pumped daily out into the Channel from the coastal towns, clear not only of cans and prams, shopping trolleys and tyres, and all the usual detritus of a vast world population eager to rid itself of its disposable but convenient trappings – but a Mediterranean clarity. You could see from the surface of the water all the way to the bottom of the harbour. And even there the mud was clean; nothing marred the rippled and water-fluted surface. But most amazingly, sunk deep to its blue funnel, an oil tanker lay submerged in the harbour. The harbour was empty of all other vessels except this monster. Not a trawler or tourist boat could be seen on the still, smooth water. There was only this oil tanker, completely visible through the glass-clear water.

I stood and looked at the sunken giant for some time. And time and again my eye was drawn to the only part of the tanker protruding from the water: the funnel. The funnel was blue, with a gold star on it. The blue was deep, and electric; so deep it was almost black, yet so bright it seemed to burn. The gold was quintessentially gold – though only a colour, it seemed precious in its own right, a precious colour, a twenty-two-carat colour. I was mesmerised by the combination of colours, and the incongruity of that single giant funnel rising from the clear water of the empty harbour. Phil and Chris had walked on, leaving me alone, contemplating the form and colour of the funnel. After a while I became aware that I couldn’t smell the fish, diesel and oil I had learned to associate with the harbour, and even the seagulls were quiet.

On Thursday the 3^rd April, Chris and I hitched back to Warminster, leaving the croaky Frog Dancer once again to his own devices. Our journey only took three and half hours. Phil’s mum had made us “lovely sandwiches”, but as Chris noted in a later letter, we never ate them until we arrived at my house.

Soon after this, in May I believe, Phil visited Warminster. But that is another story.

Launching my first commercial venture …

It would be rude of me not share my wife’s excitement about her new venture 🙂

Wonders out of a Redhead

I am so excited … hold the front page … This week I launched my first creative commercial venture … an Etsy shop where I can sell my handmade books. I’ve been making handmade journals, commonplace books and sketchbooks for a while now and this week I finally took the leap of faith into the world of setting up my own online shop.

Journaling has always been so incredibly important to me and having beautiful books to write in makes keeping a journal even more special.

So, what is a journal?

It’s your story, your history, your present moment. It’s a gateway into who you really are and how you really feel. It’s a place to play and a place to get down to some serious work. Keeping a journal, whether you do it every day, once a week, or only in moments of strong emotions, good or bad, can…

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The Bokeh of Various Lenses 1

So, this summer I was experimenting with still life photography, using various pots and garden flowers, and various lenses. While I was doing this I thought it might be educational for me to take a series of photographs using the same subject and background using various of my lenses at their maximum aperture, so that I could get a feel for the quality of the out-of-focus areas (the bokeh, indeed). Having done that, I thought it might also be of interest to any other passing photographer to see the results.

There is nothing scientific about this “test” or “comparison”. It is qualitative rather than quantitative. So, without further ado, let’s get into it.

All photos were taken with a Sony A7r2 on a tripod, using appropriate adaptors.

The first lens is an Autochinon 50mm f1.4 (PK mount). This is the version with the six-bladed iris, rather than the one with … more blades (I can’t remember exactly how many, but I know the other version is a lot more expensive). It’s a busy but bubbly kind of bokeh.

Autochinon 50mm f1.4

The second lens is a Canon 50mm f1.8 (manual focus, FD mount). This lens is from an old Canon AV-1. The bokeh seems quite similar to the Autochinon — although perhaps the bubbles are slightly better defined.

Canon 50mm f1.8

The third lens is the good old Helios 44-M f2.0 (M42 mount). I appear to have moved the camera slightly closer in this shot. You can, however, see the difference in the bokeh. There are still some bubbles, but fewer of them, and it all feels a little more swirly.

Helios 44-M f2.0

Finally, the fourth lens is the Sony SAL 50mm f1.4. The bokeh here seems a little harsher; certainly less bubbly than the Autochinon and Canon, and not swirly like the Helios. There’s something kind of… sharp… about this bokeh. It’s not offensive but it wouldn’t be my go to lens for out-of-focus highlights, However, it does have other advantages, chief among them autofocus on my A99 and A7R2.

Sony SAL 50mm f1.4

One further interesting comparison might be with the Canon 40mm f2.8 lens. This doesn’t open as wide as the other lenses, so more of the background is in focus. Still, in this scene, I find the OOF areas a little gnarly. As with the Sony above, it’s not offensive, but I don’t… quite… like it. Again though, it is a small, light, AF lens, even on an adaptor, so very useful.

Canon 40mm f2.8

My favourites are undoubtedly the two old manual focus lenses at the top of this post, the Autochinon 50mm f1.4 and the Canon 50mm f1.8.

(The head photo at the top of this post was taken with a projector lens with a homemade cardboard triangular iris. More on the bokeh of other lenses in the next post!)