Not sponsored but I’ll still take your money#

About a year ago I got real burned out on photography. Burnt out? Burnt ends.

While I dabbled in photography for years and years since I was a kid, I went pretty hard in the paint for a couple of years doing skate photography and concert photography (in the form of shitty basement show type stuff). I got paid for some shots, and even got one published locally and another used as album art by a local band.

And then it stopped being fun, for whatever reason. That’s probably the topic for another post though.

But more recently (a month or so ago) I impulse bought one of those memetic “lens from a disposable camera retrofitted for modern cameras” lenses. Specifically the Retropia, but I’m sure they’re all largely the same. And since I was going on vacation, I decided to take it along with me. Thought maybe I could respark my interest in photography.

Lens on my Fuji X-T5

The verdict? I don’t know.

Let it all out#

There’s definitely some complaints about this thing:

• Drop ships from China
• Fits the mount poorly
• No mount lock so you can just twist it off by accident
• No mount indication (was initially concerned I received the wrong model)
• It’s an f11 (jesus christ)
• Bad DOF for focus
• Related to above, high mininmum focus distance

As much as my camera tried to tell me the shot was in focus using the standard manual focus peaking, it was wrong like 80% of the time.

(Not strictly an issue with the lens but I did also get the associated flash, which turns out while it says “almost universally usable” or whatever garbage, it doesn’t work with the Fuji hot shoe mount.)

The evidence#

But, here’s some of the shots I took with it while on vacation. These have been minimally edited, and any editing performed is well within my normal editing style.

When I do photography, I tend to follow a 10% workflow - that is, of the raw photos I take, I mark about 10% of those for possible editing, then of that number I actually edit and export 10%.

Using this lens my hit rate was higher, but that might have been due to the mindfulness of knowing this lens will have certain limitations (as in, don’t try to shoot low light, or action, or infinite distance). I knew this shitty $40 lens wasn’t going to take an award winning shot of Devil’s Kettle or the Sawtooth Mountains.

A lot of the shot compositions were geared to possible album art for postPOST so that also impacted my decisions.

While the raws may not have been impressive (or ultimately not that different from raws from my other lenses) after some light editing some shots did unexpectedly impress me. In certain situtations it felt like it was punching above its weight. But I’m not going to pack it for my next More Cheese show.

Was it worth the money? Eh.

Did it rekindle my interest in photography? Eh.

Time will tell, I guess.

If you want to get ahold of me, you can now reach me at floppyparts@proton.me. Send me whatever you want.