A Long Walk With the 17-40mm Lens

I had intended to walk around today with my father's old Promaster Spectrum 7 70-210mm f/4-5.6 lens with a Canon EF mount that came bundled with a Canon EOS 630 film camera. It's a push pull zoom and is pretty compact. These lenses appear to have a current value of between $40 and $50 dollars.

The autofocus doesn't really work. It hunts and grinds without much success. However, if you flick the switch on the lens from A to M and hold the focus button on the camera while manually focusing, the camera will beep when it's in focus. I was OK with that.

However, the aperture control doesn't work. It's missing a contact or the contact isn't in the right place or something. It can only be shot wide open which I realized when I wanted to stop down to check how many aperture blades it has. Try to stop it down and you get an error message.

That kind of ruled it out for any landscape work as there's no way to stop down. So I took the 17-40mm lens instead. This morning's walk ended up being 5.6 miles over to Peebles Island, up to lock E2, up the canal trail to the old Waterford landfill and back home.

Here are some shots. All are five file HDR composites. Information in the caption is for the normally exposed file.

20mm, f/8, 1/125 sec., ISO 100

25mm, f/8, 1/250 sec., ISO 100

27mm, f/8, 1/125 sec., ISO 100

Some algae growing in the old canal already.

29mm, f/5.6, 1/125 sec., ISO 100

17mm, f/9.5, 1/90 sec., ISO 200

I had to pass up more than a few scenes due to sun location and the inevitable shadow selfie. Here's one example I took anyway.

17mm, f/8, 1/350 sec., ISO 100

And finally, here's the Strava map of the walk.