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I used my trusty Nikon analog camera together with their digital Olympus pocket camera, which used alkaline batteries. The Sony rep couldn't get it to focus on close-up objects, so I figured it was not a good camera and certainly not worth the €549 price tag. Dreams of improved picture quality and increased control over depth-of-field made me shell out €1500 for this lightweight camera and another €1600 for two lenses and the adapters I would need to be able to use it with my collection of Sony Alpha flashes and lenses. I decided on the Huawei Honor 6X , which has a double camera on the back side, allowing images to be sharpened in post-processing, sort of like one was able to do with the (now defunct) Lytro Light Field Camera - admittedly a camera idea that intrigued me when I saw it several years ago.

Traveling along my daily path, certain things and people catch my eye. I try to capture these sights in a way that will help convey to others what I felt when I saw them. Here are some recent collections of these sights. Visit my portfolio at http://jimmartinphotography.zenfolio.com/

After shooting over a dozen Carnival (Mardi Gras) parades in and around Cologne, Germany, in the past six years , I still enjoy the excitement that exudes from the participants and onlookers. When I think about the persuasion needed to make me buy a costume this year, I wonder what the others went through. After the incidents on New Year's Eve around the Cologne Cathedral, with young women being attacked and robbed by groups of "foreign looking" men, the police were omnipresent during this year's Carnival season. As a special precaution or to give women a sense of safety, a security point was set up for women near the cathedral where they could go if they felt they were in need of help.

I was shooting with my Sony A7, the LA-EA4 adapter and the Samyang 8mm fish-eye lens. Lens flare, as can be seen in the form of a hexagon in the bottom right third of the photo, is difficult to avoid, yet easy to see while framing the picture, so you can usually position it where you want it. The top picture above was taken shooting slightly down to capture the rocks; one can see that the horizon is frowning as a result. A square crop of a mid-horizon shot with some circle flare has a tighter composition on account of the rays of light.