Tomi Jazz

A lovely little Japanese Izakaya (is there any other kind?) with live jazz. I went there with Regina on a date once.

Remember that?

Going on dates?

Before having children?

That was nice.

Low Light Camera Settings

As you can tell, this is some ultimate low light shooting. Of course the aperture was wide open at f/1.8, which isn’t that crazy compared to something like and f/1.2 or lower lens, but this lens was only $125 brand new. That, of course, being the “Nifty-Fifty” as we like to call any super cheap 50mm lens with a fast aperture. They’re super easy to make, and give you the brightest lens you can for the money. They’re often light, too, and that combination of factors meant this lens was glued to my camera.

I bought a replacement as come point for my original one, and I honestly cannot remember why. I don’t know if the old one broke, or if I lost it, or gave it away, or what. I’m not a fan of the fly-by-wire focus control, but I rarely manually focused with it anyway, so it hardly matters.

Nowadays you can get tons of fun cheap manual focus 50s from the likes of 7Artisans, TTartisan, Brighten Star, and the like, and they can be a lot of fun to use. But if you’re still rocking an old Canon EF mount camera, this one is easy-peasy to use and just as cheap as those.

At least half of all the photos I look for 10 years of my career was on this little thing - and it was primary because I was so frequently shooting in conditions like this. I shot a lot of restaurants at night.