Hey Ya'll! Hope your week has been great! Mine? Great! This last weekend my photography club the Goldsboro Area Photography Club had its monthly Workshop/Photo trip. We have some sort of workshop or photowalk monthly to pair with our monthly meeting topic if possible. We get the ideas for our trips and workshops from critiques that we pass out at the end of the year asking questions about how to improve our club and one of the questions is where would you like to go or what type of workshop would you like to attend.  The Mount Airy/Pilot Mountain had been on a few critiques in the last couple of years and the club had never been to it so we decided to try it out this year. Spoiler Alert! It was a hit and we had a ball. So why is this small North Carolina foothills town worth a two and a half hour drive to get to? If you grew up in the US in 60's and 70's you definitely know about the TV show Mayberry RFD starring Andy Griffith . This show depicted a small southern town in the 1950's and 60's with its Sheriff "Andy" with its main character. A single father with Opie his young son played by Ron Howard who was famous for his 1970's hit "Happy Days" and later became a director and won an Academy , Emmy's, and even a Grammy and many more awards. The backdrop for this great show was the little town Mayberry which was modeled after Andy Griffiths childhood home town of Mount Airy. If you haven't seen Mayberry RFD you can still find it in re-runs still showing on TV it was that good of a show! Still showing 50 years later. Now about our trip.

As I said earlier we had quite a drive to get to our first destination of Mount Airy. So we left at 7 in the morning with a small caravan heading to Mayberry. LOL  Now that might seem like a long way to go for a day trip but I would say that sometimes the drive to and back from the trip are as much fun as the workshop/photowalk itself. You get to talk to fellow photographers and friends and catch up on what they are doing and what they are thinking. It seems like when we get back together we all become silly like when we were kids in summer camp. We just can't help ourselves. On the way up we stopped at an overlook that shows the road to Pilot Mountain with the mountain looming in the background. It was just a one shot stop but it was enough to get our photography juices flowing. We made it to Mount Airy and arrived at the Andy Griffith Playhouse and found parking. Now this is a small town so anywhere you park you're only a few blocks away from anything.

We walked to the main street in town which of course was named "Main" street and the street is lined with specialty shops and eateries. Everything "Mayberry" from Floyds barbershop to Opie's candy store. Even a little restaurant called "Barneys" (who was Andy's Deputy Sheriff) . There are lots of cool murals painted all over town and it is a very cool town to photograph. There are old patrol cars that you can take a ride in and I even saw a trolley that would take you around town. We stayed on foot checking out all of the sites and peeking into shops along the way to get the souvenir or two. We had lunch at Barneys. I had a Barney burger special which was great! There is a ice cream shop that some of our members took part in while everyone kind of spread out and took photo's.

After awile we decided to start our way back home which meant a stop at Pilot Mountain State Park. Pilot mountain is a distinctive rocky knob that rises 200 feet from a forested base. This unique looking peak is very photogenic. We stopped and got our photo's of this rocky knob then headed to the visitor center to learn about the area and of course get more souvenirs . LOL We then headed back home with a stop at a 7-11 convince store to get a Slurpee for the ride home. Which is starting to be a thing. LOL 

We had a great time shooting and exploring this little tourist town of days gone by.  Consider joining a local photography club for outings and fun workshops and a chance to meet people who are like minded and love to have fun. Until next week! Get Out and Shoot!

Hey Everyone! Hope you've had a great week! Me ? Pretty good and it's getting hot in the south. Heat index over 100 degrees Fahrenheit today. Whew! Thats why I'm indoors writing this blog to stay cool. I know I've been all about film the last couple of months but today I want to talk about some digital adjustments I'm making to my digital kit. I am updating my mid-range zoom.  There are a few reasons that I'm updating my mid-range zoom. First let me say that the zoom that I replaced the 24-105mm f/4 G is an excellent lens and had great optical quality and built like a tank.  It had a great focal range but its biggest draw back was that it is heavy. It was heavy enough that I wouldn't take it with me if I was going on a walk or photo walk around town. It was just too big and heavy weighing in at 663 grams compared to the 488 grams of the 20-70mm. No matter what camera I put this on the Sony A7III or my Sony A7C it was very lens heavy. The length was 4.5 inches before being extended for the longer focal lengths compared to the 3.9 inches of the 20-70mm. So it was bigger and heaver. And if you know me I like compact camera kits and lenses for a walk  around photowalks that I love so much.  Ever since this lens came out in 2023 I've had an eye out for it but just haven't pulled the trigger.  Until last week. Now you know that I really don't buy very much new equipment and I found one at MPB and traded my 24-105mm and a beloved 28mm lens for the 20-70mm. I hated getting rid of the 28mm but I knew that I wouldn't use it with the new lens on.  If I need a 28mm lens to play with I have two other manual ones that I can adapt to my Sony digitals. So let me go over some of the specs of this Sony 20-70mm lens.

-Sony 20-70mm f/4 G. As the model name says its a 20-70mm focal range . Most mid-range are 24-70mm even though its only 4mm wider than standard mid ranges it does make a difference. Great for street and a travel walk around lens. This may be the only lens with this range and the 20mm focal length is great for folks that Vlog. Works great for arm distance selfies and videos.

-Sony 20-70mm f/4 G- The f/4 is the constant widest aperture for this lens. Now there are many lenses with f/2.8 widest aperture and they are great and expensive. Almost twice the price and weight of this lens. That is only one stop of light difference and unless you really need that one stop you can't tell the difference.  I have been using f/4 lenses for quite a while and don't miss the one stop of light if I really need to shoot in super low light I either use a tripod or put on a prime with one or two stops faster than the f/4 like a f/2.8 or a f/1.8.

-Sony 20-70mm f/4 G The G moniker on this lens means its of high quality. Sony makes standard lenses with no moniker, G lenses like this one and G Master lenses highest quality. This is a very sturdy build lens and feels good in the hand.  It is moisture and dust resistant with rubber gaskets that seal everything and one between camera and lens. 

-Lens features- This lens sports an aperture ring which I love on my lenses. It has two programable buttons that you can program all sorts of stuff on from eye focus , to almost anything else in the camera. It has a manual/ auto focus switch. It has a click/de-click button for the aperture ring. and an iris lock switch. It uses 72mm filters which are the same as its sister lens the 16-35mm f/4 G which I also have. So I don't have to buy new filters.

-Focusing Motors- Its has dual XD linear focusing motors. Which means there are two rails with motors on either side of the lens and the focusing is super quick and really beats the older type of motors and focusing systems found on the older 24-105mm. It is very quick. The 20-70 has a minimum focusing distance of .25 meter or 9.8 inches compared to the .31 meter or  14.9 inches on the 24-105mm. This makes it very good for close up detail shots within 12 inches.  Does very good on close up stuff.

-Stabilization- This lens is not stabilized unlike the 24-105mm. But almost all of Sony's camera have IBIS (in body image stabilization ) which will work just fine for me and probably saves some on the weight of the lens which I'd rather have a lighter lens than the stabilization .

Is this the perfect lens? I don't think that a perfect lens exists. With every one there are compromises that have to be made if you want all the bells and whistles the lens will be heavy and bulky. If you get a stripped down model well you won't get what you want either. For now this tool seems just right for me now and will fit the way I shoot now.  What I do know that this lens will probably be on the my Sony A7C almost all of the time because it seems to be a great fit and will also work for my Sony A7III if I need it.  I have been shooting this lens for a few weeks now and love the images that I get out of it. The weight and handling of this lens is great! My over all feelings of this lens is that it's another great lens from Sony in my Kit.  Well that's enough about this lens. Until next week make sure you Get out and Shoot!
 

Max Stansell Photography Hey Everyone! Hope your week has been as good as mine.  This weeks topic is about making memories with your camera. When we take a photograph we freeze time. You can go back to old photographs and you can see everything as it was back then. Going through your mom's shoebox that is full of old photo's you can see how life was way back when. You can see the clothes , cars and how people lived when the photo was taken. This is very cool. But if you didn't take the photo or if you were not there you don't have the memories. But if you look at a photo that you took years ago you can remember everything about it. The smells, the weather, the sounds the things that you can't see on the photo. This is one of the things that I love about photography.  The hobby of photography offers things that other hobbies don't, Memories. When you look at one of your old photo's the memories flood in . 

How do we preserve the memories? Well back in the film days it was easy we sent our film to be processed and got back prints and negatives. But now a days everything is on a disc of some sort. My advice is to print some way some fashion. I print books usually at the end of the year or for film projects. This year I'm doing a film project and I'm actually having 4x6 prints made of the keepers of each roll. So that takes care of my photography themed stuff but what about family and friends that you take with your smart phone. What about the memories that you have on Facebook? I answered that and went with a company that goes onto your facebook and puts into a book all of your photo's . You can cull out the bad ones and rearrange them the way you want but its a great way to save all of the family photo's that we have now on Facebook or social media.

My camera gets me out and about. I heard that your camera is a passport to life. Meaning that without the excuse of taking some photo's we would just stay at home and not explore the world around us. That was certainly the case for me. When I got back into photography at the dawn of the digital age I took a lot of photo's at home and in my back yard. Still lifes, Macros and the such. But after a while that gets old so I started venturing out to the state parks. There was one only 10 mile from my house that I had never visited before and now I'm there 3 or 4 times a week. Actually it got to all of the state parks in North Carolina. I started hiking and visiting all of the state parks , camping and exploring all along the way. I then joined the camera club in our town that even got me out and exploring even more.  Now I travel up and down the eastern sea board and even took a trip to Utah a couple of years ago. Great memories made one every thrip. None that would have been possible without Photography. When someone names a place that I have gone before the memories flood in of the times when I was there . I can go back and see the photo's of trips I have made, the clothes I was wearing, my weight, what job I was working at the time. All of these memories flood in like it was yesterday. So to me Photography isn't just about the images we make but the memories that we take with us along the way. Well that's it for this week until next. Get out and Shoot! And make some memories.