Early last week, I returned home from a short trip to Northern Virginia and the Washington D.C. area and I brought back with me some photographs I’d like to share with y’all. This time around I packed really light —only the essentials. So, before we get started with the photos, I’d like to quickly go over the gear I picked out for this trip.
Knowing the bag policy for many of the museums ahead of time, I went with a small Lewis N. Clark cross body bag. This essentially has two large pockets with a small organizer inside the front pocket, which is perfect for having quick access to the few things I need, but is also great for security checks because it’s very easy to open the bag up for searches. There’s also some art museums and collections that require backpacks to be lockered, and carrying this, I avoided that process entirely.
For this trip, I only took one camera (plus a camcorder) and one lens (and a few filters and an adapter). This is the Sony A7S from 2014, a 12MP camera that rivals many of the modern cameras available today in low light. Attached to it is a Pergear 35mm f/1.4 lens. I brought with me a Kenko 0.7x wide angle adapter, which screws on to the front of the Pergear 35mm lens and turns it into a 24mm.
While the Kenko adapter doesn’t vignette any more than the Pergear 35mm lens already does (a lot), it’s not really possible to shoot with the adapter at a lower aperture than f/5.6. Beyond that, the image is just too soft. Thankfully, I was never in a situation where that was really necessary, and several of the wider shots you’ll find in the following sections were taken with this combo.
I also brought with me two filters for the lens. A K&F Concept Gold Streak filter, and a homemade “sea glass” filter. The Gold Streak filter is a pretty strong effect and though I do love the look of it, I knew ahead of time it’s not the kind of filter that can be used all day. The homemade “sea glass” filter is pretty simple: a UV filter spray lightly spritzed with metallic silver spray paint on the back side.
I have made a dozen or so of these over the years for nearly all of my lenses, and despite owning a few Moment CineBloom, Tiffen SoftNet, ProMist and other diffusion filters, I tend to like the results from these filters I’ve made myself. The grey, metallic particles offer a good balance between the Black ProMist filters and the GlimmerGlass filters, giving slightly lowered contrast with a significant amount of bloom to the highlights. Being homemade, I can also vary the amount of particles to suit the lens perfectly.
The main downside to homemade filters vs production filters is that the filters purchased from Tiffen, Moment, K&F, or any of the many other brands out there have the particles effecting the image sandwiched between two thin layers of glass. For the homemade filter, the back side of the glass (the side that attaches to the lens) is the side I spritz, so while the filter is in use, it’s protected. Normal spray paints tend to wear off or get smudged when stored in a pouch, but I’ve found that many of the paint companies offer metalic and semi metalic paints for re-spraying wheels on cars. This kind of paint is pretty permanent on glass, and there’s been no issue with smudging over time with this kind of paint.
I put those filters in a small LowePro case for point and shoot cameras to keep them safe along with an extra battery, and I threw in a LensPen, an old Polaroid camera strap and I stuck one of those $1 rain ponchos at the bottom of my bag just in case and that was it!
The (mostly) one camera, one lens situation didn’t feel limiting, as I feel like I still managed to get a lot of great photos, and the small bag allowed me to get through security quickly and put in 10+ miles of walking some of the days I was there. The Pergear 35mm lens was new to me, but I have been shooting the 35mm focal length for a long time on my Canon 5D (2005) with the Yongnuo 35mm f/2 lens.
Bond in Motion
At The International Spy Museum
Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center
Chantilly, VA
Well, that’s it for this week! I hope you enjoyed the photos! If you’re looking for found media, please check out my page on Archive.org for the full list of digitized media. If you have any questions, feel free to send me a message right here or drop a comment below. If you haven’t already, please check out the suggested posts below! or any of my other previous posts here. Thanks so much for checking out this week’s edition of Diptych!
See you soon!
—Forrest
These are INcredible!