Well, this post was originally scheduled to go live on Tuesday, but there was a glitch and it went live immediately. I pulled it, but then thought better of it and am putting it back up. Today is the last day of the State Fair anyway so it’s appropriate.
Before my kids grew up and launched into independent adult lives, we went to the Indiana State Fair every summer. It lasts most of August every year. Our last visit was in 2017 — and this year, I decided I wanted to go because I enjoyed it. Margaret and I went on the Saturday after my birthday. I ate a giant smoked turkey leg and fried walleye, and bought a big bag of kettle corn. I managed to forget my other State Fair tradition, which is to have some soft serve at the dairy barn. Drat it! Next year.
I brought my Nikon Df along, to which I had mounted my giant 70-300mm f/4-5.6G AF Nikkor lens. I got that lens with the Nikon N65 film SLR I used to own. Keeping the lens but not the body was the right call, and I love it that it mounts natively on the Df. At 70mm this lens provides about a 1:1 view of the world. Once in a while I had to back up a little to put my subject fully in frame, but only once in a while. At 300mm it feels like I can see halfway across the fairgrounds! This isn’t Nikon’s finest lens in either its optical design (distortion abounds) or its build quality (it’s a giant hunk of plastic, even its mount), but for days like this I’m very happy to own it.
Here are a bunch of images I made that day.
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