one lens challenge, May 1‑7, 2017
I took part in a "one lens" photo challenge hosted on fujix‑forum.com, where each person chose a single lens and posted a pic each day for a week, all taken with that one lens. There's no prize or competition, it's for fun and for practice. I chose to take my pics with a Questar 700 mirror lens.
This challenge runs from May 1 through May 7, 2017. Some of the pics are linked to larger versions (as noted in the mouseover text).
I took 103 photos on the morning of May 1, all of horses out in a field a few miles from my house. I posted this one:
click for larger version
May 2's posting. I took 104 pics (rabbits, birds, horses, and a dog) and this was the only one I liked. Mirror lens bokeh is just the ticket here. Yellow‑headed blackbird (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus), male:
Tuesday
May 3's posting. I've lived in Lone Pine for 19 years, I've seen this sign in town countless times, and only last year did I notice that it's upside down:
click for larger version
May 4's posting. I took some pics outdoors earlier in the day but didn't get anything I liked. Hence this contrived pic taken with self‑timer. I see room for improvement in the setup and lighting but I was working on it in the evening, the deadline of posting it on May 4 was approaching, and I was getting too tired to keep reshooting it. The first three pics in this series benefitted from using a 700mm focal length but there was no point to using so long a lens for this pic (other than to stick to the one‑lens rule of the project). Sigh. My least favorite of the pics so far:
Thursday
No pic posted for Friday May 5. I didn't get any pics that I liked.
cutting edge photography
May 7's posting. A storm had passed through, we had great clouds today, and a number of photographers were out in the hills.
Sunday
From a warm‑up session a few days before the challenge started:
click for larger version
lathe Lighting setup for the May 6 photo.

Plus some daylight from an open door.
The Questar 700 was in production from 1976‑1986. Info about the lens is about 2/3 of the way down on this page. As the name suggests, focal length is 700mm. Aperture is f/8 (the only option, there's no iris). I'm using it with a Fuji X-E1 camera:
Questar 700, Fuji X-E1