Spring Sports Saturday
Month: March 2025
The Boy
Elsa Portrait
A portrait of our scaredy-cat with the new camera.
New Camera
The decision to leave my school and take a chance with at a new school teaching a new subject was in some ways difficult and in other ways easy. Seventeen years in a place can do that to you.
Changing camera systems is sort of the same. The first real camera I bought was in Poland: a Zenit I bought at the jarmark. After that, I bought a Nikon. When I returned to the States, I bought my first and last Canon, and a couple of years after that, I bought my first digital camera, a Sony. Finally, when we bought a DSLR, we went back to Nikon. First, a D70s. Then a D300. And seven years ago, almost to the day (6 March 2018), we bought a D500.
It was about time for an upgrade.
But to what? DSLRs are on the way out — it’s all mirrorless these days. And besides, we wanted something small: the D500 with the 2.8 lens weighs over 1600 grams, and it’s huge. Not as big as a D6, but not as professionally expensive, either.
We’d been using our Fuji X100 almost exclusively over the last year or so, and we’d gotten spoiled with its size and simplicity. But it was nearing its end: released in 2011, our lovely little Fuji was 14 years old — ancient by digital camera standards. So, again, it was time for an upgrade.
We wanted something small, but in the end, we wanted a bit more functionality than the X100 series would offer. While we love the camera, it does have its limitations. We thought briefly about the Fuji X-Pro 3, which is similar to the X100 series but with interchangeable lenses. But that price…
In the end, we decided to change camera systems entirely and go with the Sony a6700.
When the battery was charged up, E and I took the dog and the camera for a walk to see its low-light capabilities. The same walk, in fact, that we took with the D500…
Ramadan Thoughts
Four sweet, dark-haired, dark-eyed girls crowded around me and asked, almost in unison, “Can we go to the media center during lunch?” It’s Ramadan, and my four Muslim students (three are from Afghanistan and one is from Syria) are eager to avoid even the sight of food while they are fasting. They cluster together throughout the whole day: the guidance counselor purposely made their schedule so that they have almost every class together since they feel safest with each other.
Of course, I agreed for them to go to the media center: growing up in a strange Christian sect that borrowed all the Jewish festivals, I had to fast one day a year during Yom Kippur, though our sect preferred the translated name, the Day of Atonement. I have a slight sense, then, of the challenge my Muslim students face, though only a very slight sense: we didn’t go to school or work on the Day of Atonement, and it was only one day. I can’t imagine what it would be like to fast all day and to go about one’s regular schedule at the same time, so I’m certainly sympathetic to the difficulties they face this month.
When we got back from lunch, the girls were waiting at the classroom door. They came into the room and immediately asked if they could go pray. “If we don’t pray while we’re fasting,” one girl explained, “it doesn’t count.”
I looked at them quizzically: “Why didn’t you pray while you were in the media center during lunch?”
“It was too early,” another of the girls explained.
The skeptic in me wondered if they will start asking questions at some point. Would a truly good god be so upset that you prayed a few minutes early? Would a fair god be obsessed with females’ modesty in clothing while ignoring males’ modesty? Would a wise god really be all that worried about what animal you eat? These were the same kind of questions I asked myself years ago, and when I dallied in Catholicism a few years ago, I didn’t find resolution to these issues; I just temporarily stopped thinking about them. But once they’re there…
Monday Soccer
The Boy
Landscaping Changes
