A Test Drive on the Tracks – Evolution Part II

Recovering from eye surgery to treat cataracts, as in my “Evolution” post, I decided to take these new monofocal IOL (intraocular lens) implants for a test drive. To really see what they can do, I turned off autofocus. After all, distance vision is sharp enough to actually drive a car with no glasses at all. It stands to reason that manual focusing, something that has always been a struggle, should be considerably easier.

I was told by the doctor that it’s extremely rare to have a cataract patient that is only in their 40s. The doctor goes over all the side effects during the consultation, and then he ends it by saying “I normally don’t cover all those long term side effects because the majority of our patients don’t live that long.” Morbid of a joke as it was, I got a good laugh out of it. But being a photo blogger, the audience may want to join in on one of the rarest and most bizarre journeys a photographer will take.

I’m sure autofocus would have done fine but I was really interested to see what they could do. Is manual focus better than auto, now that it’s actually usable in a realistic way? Definitely maybe.

As can be seen here in the official first “post-surgery shot,” the focus ring works.

On a sweltering hot day with temperatures in the 90s and heat indexes in the low 100s (for countries using the Farenheit scale), the clouds are what struck my eyes first, along with the deep blue and green. Far in the background is a Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing plant, known more commonly as 3M. Working away making post-it notes and scotch tape I would imagine. I am facing the right with the previous shot at my back.

Lastly, about a mile away, I found this underpass shot. The brightness of sunlight is almost too much and I had to have sunglasses above, but in this shot, there is no polycarbonate between my eyes and the camera.

In this age of global violence, Asian and South American human rights corruption, infectious disease, weird old orange men fighting senile old dementia patient white men for the codes to launch nuclear missiles from America, confederate flags that just won’t go away despite the fact that the north won (seriously I checked the history books), how about we try shooting photos and not each other? And perhaps enjoy some good Eurovision – Americans just can’t make entertainment like that.

Post script addendum – this is an Adobe-free zone. After over a decade of supporting Adobe products that rarely (if ever) work right, I only loathe them more as time goes on. But, that’s another post altogether. Remind me to get on a rant about that sometime.