Pretty little things, aren't they? Yesterday we celebrated the birthdays of my two younger kids. Katie was 26 on Sunday and Robby turns 24 today. Both are interested in photography and have taken photography courses but are without cameras. Katie does have a camera but it is a broken OM1. The Red FED 2 had been my primary rangefinder but with the repair of the Leica IIIc and the fortunate acquisition of a Zorki 3M, the little FED has been sitting on a shelf. I got the Zorki 4 in a trade. I was interested primarily in the lens on it, a tabbed J8 50mm lens. The black lens on the Red FED was my favorite minty J8. I hadn't had a chance to relube the tabbed J8 yet but I went ahead and put it on the Red FED for Katie. I had an extra I-61 50mm lens that I put on the Zorki 4 for Robby. Neither had light meters so I made a couple.

The business card has the Sunny 16 rule on it. It pretty much covers what you need to know to make good exposures outdoors. A fancier version is a slide rule exposure calculator I found on the web. It needed some modification in Photoshop, printing out, and some assembly. My kids are in their mid 20s and I'm still up late the night before assembling toys for them. I'm thankful for that. I printed out some camera instructions and threw in a roll of film apiece. Of course I made some wrist straps for them. I'm glad to see them taking pictues again.

This is a depressing story. Proceed at your own risk. There was another item I ordered for Katie and Robby's cameras, a ventilated lens hood from heavystar on eBay.

They arrived yesterday (Actually it is Tuesday but I'm still up from Monday so is Monday today or yesterday?) They are very nice. I got an extra one for my tabbed J8. I tried it out first on my 35mm J12.

That's my lovely J12. Truly a wonderful lens. It's self hooded so a lens hood is a little reduntant but the lens hood looked nice on the J12 and made changing apertures much easier. I then got out the tabbed J8 that I need to relube.

That's the tabbed J8 50mm lens on my Zork 3M. The J8 and J12 are my primary lenses for my rangefinders. I tried to screw the lens hood on to the J8. It just didn't want to go on. Then I remembered that the outer ring with the filter threads was dented. So I put the lens hood back on the 35mm J12. It screwed on harder then the first time. When it was on I noticed it was not on square. I had cross threaded it. Then things went bad. I unscrewed it. It was on tight and, with the leverage of the lens hood, I apparently sheared off in internal pin and inscrewed the front element off of the lens body destroying the lens. So, in a space of about two minutes I screwed up the threads on the J8, screwed up the threads on the lens hood, and destroyed my J12. The J8 won't really be usable for me unless I can screw on filters or a lens hood so it is pretty much toast. And then I discovered I was out of beer.

Fortunately I have a 50mm f3.5 I-50 so I still can use a rangefinder. It's not like I don't have my Pentax SLRs to take up any slack for 35mm photography but this is pretty depressing.