Some of the people we encountered in Kosovo stayed with me. Photographically there were two that hit me. The family living across the street from the brown coal plant was difficult for me. The Mother of two was telling us that she was happy there, and did not want to leave Kosovo, although her family was living on 70 Euro per month. I was able to make her portrait with her house and the plant behind her. The smile on her face made the image more surreal to me.
As I open my suitcase, the stench of burned brown coal stings the inside of my nose, evoking good memories of a trip that was over much too soon. The glint in the eye of the many Protagonist’s open faces I stared into, stare back at me, in my mind’s eye, every time I blink. Kosovo, Europe’s youngest country, has me under her spell.
A Little less than a month in, and I am starting to really like using the A7ii.
This camera has not been all love all the time. The files are noisy over iso 400, the focus peaking is not very accurate wide open, and the white balance has a very strange sense of humour while the dynamic range and exposure latitude of the raw files just isn't that amazing. However what it does do well, it does very well.
As a child, I so desperately wanted to join the boy scouts. My parents, for their own reasons, thought that the scouts were an autocratic organisation based upon a military structure. I didn't get to join… However the scouts motto stayed with me: “Be Prepared!”. OK I added the exclamation mark.
Yesterday I bought a Sony A7ii. I was a little unsure about the purchase, but I knew I needed to change my current carry around camera solution. What I had was undependable, absolute crap at autofocusing, and very slow at manual focusing. When it worked, it worked well, but there was always a certain anxiety about shooting with it, because of the focus problems that my workflow did not allow a margin of error or the time for.
