I suppose that there is such thing as being too literal in these titles, hey? While I was broadening my horizons with a wider-angle lens last week, I was also thinking about how I don’t often use my longer lenses either. So, on Monday, I decided to take advantage of the morning sun and mount the very heavy (~760g!) 200mm Rokkor to the XG1 to see life a little more telescopically.

It was a fun challenge to frame things both from a distance with a lens that demands I slow down and stabilize myself to compose the image. Unfortunately, I was also given a reminder of why I’m less likely to use it.

For one reason or another – none of them complimentary or justified – when my trans¹ self is walking around hefting a camera with an inordinately long lens, more people seem to take what I am doing as somehow threatening or nefarious. Fortunately, I was not accosted by anybody, but I was not prepared for the sorts of looks I received. Like full scowls.

Alas, there are sometimes days like that. It’s probably not helping that we’re entering tourism season and, as happens every year, people who might be less familiar with the sight of a trans person going about their day often take that opportunity to get an eye full. Gawking isn’t just for your five-year-old, it seems.

After some promising results from chemistry I had just about given up on, I decided to take the chance and develop this roll in the cursed kit. As the gallery above might show, I was able to get some results in scanning, but my gosh, were the negatives ever thin.

I wouldn’t say that it was a struggle, exactly, but I really had to slide that highlights thing to the left and keep the midtones up (and bring down the reds a bit) to get these. While I’m not entirely displeased with the results, they betray they were recovered from underdeveloped negatives.

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1. This didn’t really happen to me pre-transition. ↩︎