w/e 2019-07-21

This week included:

• A couple of days making progress on the next milestone of Job Garden.

• A day feeling not-quite-migrainey-but-still-not-very-well. Although I was well enough to watch Sarah Pascoe’s stand-up show LadsLadsLads , which cheered the day up.

• A Meisner drop-in class in which I did the repetition exercise with someone I’d never met before, which always makes it a bit more interesting. I think it objectively went fine but I instantly started beating myself up over the few times I got stuck in my head and probably prevented us going further than we did.

• A night shoot in Peckham, picking up a few shots from a shoot a few weeks back. Because they managed to combine a few shots together (and, obviously, because me and the other (main) actor nailed everything) it was over more quickly than expected. Incidentally, unlike last time’s 4.20am bus, the 1.30am bus from Peckham is emptier, with a mixture of people ending their night out, a few possibly heading to work, and some heading for the train to Gatwick and 5 or 6am flights.

• Reading The Worst is Yet to Come: A Post-Capitalist Survival Guide by Peter Fleming which is a quick read, but I don’t feel much better prepared for the surviving the future than I did before. It contains many examples of how the world is getting worse for the vast majority of people. It contains many of grim stories from a couple of years’ worth of news crammed into 100 pages. So if you avoid the news because it’s too depressing and want a quick catch-up, maybe this is for you! It mainly felt like Fleming had to get all this out of his system which is understandable.

Also, I bought a new camera. I’ve been wanting to buy a new camera for years, having never quite got on with the Sony NEX-6 I bought n years ago. I wanted something with more physical, rather than digital, controls. OK, I wanted something more old-fashioned, the kind of thing a middle-aged man nostalgic for using a simple film camera would use. I imagine.

Over the years the target of my desires changed as new models came and went. The Fujifilm X100 series is lovely but I was never sure its fixed 35mm-equivalent lens was what I’d want to be stuck with. I recently settled on its cousin(?), the Fujifilm X-E3 which is a similar size, has interchangeable lenses and, for my needs, is nearly as good as the X-Pro2 only smaller and cheaper.

After a few months of keeping an eye on eBay, this week I suddenly went for an almost-new X-E3 and a used 35mm ƒ2 lens (50mm-ish equivalent). Now I only have to cope with buyer’s remorse (“Aaarggh, I spent hundreds on something I don’t really need, I’ll never be able to retire now!”) and understanding how to use the camera. Why are they so complicated? Why have decent UIs not made their way to cameras yet? Honestly, I just want an opinionated digital camera that’s as simple as my old Pentax K1000. Anyway, yay! And let me know if you want a Sony NEX-6 before I eBay it.

That’s all for this week. Enjoy the weather, whatever it is where you are.