Nikkor-S 55mm f/1.2

Nikkor-S Kogaku 55mm f/1.2



This is the Nikkon flagship lens from the sixties! Nikon is famous for using the same mount from back then all through til today's DSLRs.



However, the sales person hesitated today to sell me a used Nikon D60 out of fear, it would destroy the electronic contacts inside the camera. Well, I trusted google, that it is one of only four models that can hold this lens without any modification (they are all low end models, as they don't have something that would collide with something in all the other models' hardware - don't ask me what).



So it worked, thought Nikon disabled the light metering functionality (for no reason but to discourage using old manual focus lenses or to sell more high end cameras - ironically it would work using a Canon DSLR with a Nikon adapter!).

So here is a picture with the Nikon lens, the Minolta 35-135mm zoom used for the three photos above, oh, this photo is made with aperture f/4 thought.



But the bigger problem is actually using the lens full open with aperture f/1.2 and getting the focus right. Actually it is difficult to see the final effect without any magnification before making a shot.



Well, I will work on that.

Freeplane

After using the FreeMind mind mapping software for many years, navigation had become sluggish with a single mega map keeping my ever growing notes... Looking for some tips how to best split up the data map or if other people have similar problems and maybe someone is working on making the software faster or smarter, found out one or two of the core developers forked the project and created Freeplane based on FreeMind.

Loading the 2010 stable version 1.1.3 (FreeMind 0.9 is from early 2011) the sluggishness just disappeared. Good job!

Only thing is I had to configure Freeplane under Preferences to always save the folding information!

BTW, nowadays I use this Mind Mapping tool 99.99 percent as a kind of knowledge base or How To list. It is very quick to navigate (now again ;-), and when copy pasting things into a Unix terminal each line gets copied with a line ending, so before something gets ironed out in a little program shell script I can just keep some commands in FreeMine/Freeplane for later copy and paste usage.

For ToDo lists however I use and need something with a calendar, not for planning when to do what (that never worked for me as things always take their own time and everything else has been just wishful thinking on my side), but to pop up when I have to be reminded to focus or start with something (or to push something back).

OK, here are the links in case Google's servers are down today:

Freeplane
FreeMind