In a previous post, I went on about how I was unsatisfied with my old Olympus OM manual focus lenses on a crop sensor and how it bothered me that 50mm != 50mm. I ended up buying a full-frame camera in the form of a Sony Alpha A7II to fulfill my desires. Using the EVF (electronic view finder) on a mirrorless camera is inherently easier when it comes to using manual focus. Focus aids like focus peaking and focus zoom make it relatively trivial to get critically sharp images for semi-static subjects. If, however, you’re trying to capture images of your two year old child as they learn to walk (and fall down), using manual focus lenses might leave you less than impressed and certainly with a lot of out of focus images.

…and eventually came back

A while ago, I wrote that I left full-frame for µ4/3. I started to feel like the bulk of a full-frame DSLR was prohibitive. What’s the point of a fancy camera if you’re less inclined to take it anywhere. Their output is generally second to none but even a cellphone picture is better than no picture if you’re not willing to lug around 3+ lbs (1440g). To some degree that’s still true.

A couple months ago, we were down in central California dealing with the passing of my father-in-law when one of our dogs (Lilly) suddenly fell ill. She was wobbly and acting drunk so we rushed her to the emergency clinic where they saw she was bleeding internally. We then rushed her to UC Davis where she underwent emergency surgery. There was a small tumor on her spleen that was bleeding. She had a splenectomy and they also biopsied her liver. She has fully recovered from the surgery since, but was ultimately diagnosed with hemangiosarcoma. The prognosis was one to three months with chemo.

Before…