My favorite thing to do with a new-to-me old camera is take it on a road trip, but I can’t always get away. So I end up shooting an awful lot around my house and yard. I might well have the most-photographed residence in Indianapolis. (I’ve collected all of those photos into this Flickr album!) This is a typical around-the-house photo, as this flat scene lets me test sharpness and contrast. I shot this with my Pentax H3 and a 55mm f/2 Super Takumar lens on Kodak Gold 200. I wish I had exposed a half-stop less to blunt the slightly blown-out whites.
Longtime readers might remember that I’ve shown photos like this one before, and I always lamented the sorry state of my sills and shutters. They badly needed scraped and caulked and painted, but I just dreaded, and procrastinated, the job. I lamented it to my mother early last year — and she brightened. “I’ll do it!” she said. What? You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m 48, so you can make educated guesses at my mom’s general age. “Nope. I like doing work like this. You know I can’t stand not being busy!” So my mom came over every sunny day for weeks last spring and summer, climbing up and down a ladder to scrape and paint. And now my sills and shutters are gorgeous! Bless that woman.
