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Not a very grand day out

 I bought this Panasonic Lumix G7 back at the end of 2015, and in all the intervening years it hasn't been a regular on my days out. But recently I picked up a Brightin Star 10mm f5.6 lens for about sixty dollars just to have a weird lens that won't make people vomit (like my 25mm CCTV lens with epic swirly bokeh).


On the 18th June I decided to take this out and do some test shooting to see how it goes. This was a bad idea. For a start, when I arrived at East Croydon station I found that due to trespassers on the line all trains were delayed by over 20 minutes. But then a second incident meant the entire south-east railway network ground to a halt again, so the train I'd gone to catch arrived an hour late. But then they announced it wasn't doing the full route and so I had to wait an extra 20 minutes for a connection. So I arrived an hour and a half later at my destination.


I'd gone to Pevensey (sadly the train tickets no longer say "Pevensey and W'ham" which was funny) because the castle is pretty photogenic and here you can see the distortion of this particular lens, and that it's pretty sharp. Lens has f5.6 aperture and that's it. Stick the camera in aperture priority mode and you're good to go.


Like I said, photogenic. 

Even from the other side. 


The only Norman castle to feature a machine-gun emplacement, although that was added in 1939. I think it's kind of a shame they haven't opened up the inside so you can see out from the slot.

Balls! A pyramid of ammo for your trebuchet.


Again with this lens you can really see the distortion of any straight horizontals well off the centre line which kind of reminds me of my Zenit Horizon 202.

At this point it had started to rain, nowt to mean owt, but then to my dismay the nearby tearooms were fully booked so I walked on to Pevensey Bay, where a large bank of shingle would have made it tiresome to get down to sea level and climb back up the banking again so I didn't, and had a beer instead.


Given what it looked like over there, and it had started raining again, I then decided the best idea was to get the bus back and shelter in another pub to have a beer and see if the rain would stop before heading to the station and home.

So things didn't really work out but I did get to try out this cheap lens and got LOTS of exercise, so that's mostly good.

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