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long hiatus since the last post. still have a bunch of photos from the bangalore trip eons ago sitting in the hard drive that i'm too lazy to go through and edit... and a recent crash of the notebook's drive also dragged along a bunch of photos with it..

anyway, photo's from a quick test of the super-takumar 200mm f4 that just arrived in the mail... bokeh wide-open appears to be quite harsh, but a little better than the 135mm f3.5 at least. but looking at the size, i'll probably not be using it much due to laziness to carry it around. the min focus distance - at 2.5m - also limits its usefulness, and adding extension tubes to an already pretty long lens is guaranteed to attract a lot of stares from passer-bys...

also a first try with editing using Picasa. options are pretty much limited, e.g. contrast adjustment are auto-only with no custom settings, and the so-called 'lucky' one-click adjustment mess up the colors more often than producing something nice... what i'm after is a lightweight freeware for quick minor adjustments instead of having to fire up memory-gobbling Photoshop for the tiniest of things, but i guess Picasa isn't what i want - although, to it's credit, it's pretty fast in use, and feature-wise will likely appeals to many. also, it irritates me for insisting to scan 'my documents/my pictures' folders for images and doesn't let me skip these folders. not everyone likes to store stuff in the default windows folders, and there are stuff in there that i don't want them showing up in Picasa browser...